A departmental split to end turf wars?

Reding gets her way and her own department; decision follows change of heart by Barroso.

The European Commission’s directorate-general for justice, freedom and security has been split in two. Last week’s meeting of European commissioners approved the split, which takes effect on 2 July.

It was a decision that came as a surprise to many Commission insiders. As recently as November, when Commission President José Manuel Barroso announced that he was appointing two commissioners, where previously there had been one, he rejected the idea of splitting the department.

He appointed Viviane Reding as commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, and he appointed Cecilia Malmström as commissioner for home affairs, but he rejected Reding’s request to split the department.

Citizens’ rights

Reding argued that a split would ensure that due attention was paid to the protection of citizens’ rights, which she said had suffered when the dominant focus was, post-2001, on the security agenda. Malmström, on the other hand, wanted to keep the department together.

Jonathan Faull, who has headed the department as director-general for justice, freedom and security since 2003, argued privately against a split, saying that one directorate-general could serve both commissioners. Differences of opinion could be resolved internally before they reached the level of commissioner or heads of commissioners’ private offices, he argued.

But Faull is now moving on to become the Commission’s director-general for the internal market – a decision flagged up in November but not endorsed until last week. And Faull now takes a different line. Speaking to the European Policy Centre on Monday (7 June), he said splitting the department was a good idea because having two directors-general was better than one. He had not always been able to be in two places at the same time, he said.

Officials familiar with the decision point out that the Commission’s organisation will match the set-up in most national governments, where one minister deals with home affairs issues and one with justice matters.

Three directorates

The new directorate-general for justice will have three directorates, or sub-divisions: civil justice, criminal justice, and fundamental rights and citizenship. The latter will retain the lead on drugs policy and data protection.

The directorate-general for home affairs also has three directorates: immigration and asylum, migration and borders, and security.

Each department will have its own communication units.

Following the pattern set by the split of the former directorate-general for transport and energy into two departments, and the creation of a climate action department separate from the environment directorate-general, a “shared resource service” covering budgetary matters and audit, human resources, information technology and document management, will work to both the new departments.

But compared to the transport and energy split, there seems to have been little preparation. The intention to split transport and energy was announced in December 2008. Claude Chêne, recently the director-general for personnel and administration, was asked to prepare a report on the separation by March 2009 and the split happened in November.

The justice and home affairs split has instead followed more closely the pattern set by the creation of the department for climate action, announced in November and then improvised. The risk in such improvisation is that time is wasted on issues of internal organisational.

Reding v Malmström

Why then did Barroso have a change of heart over splitting justice and home affairs? To a large extent he seems to have been improvising. The departure of Faull to another department (a move that Barroso had instigated for other reasons) provided the president with the opportunity: he can appoint two new directors-general and neither has the advantage or handicap of previous incumbency.

Just as important was that Reding and Malmström were already fighting turf wars. They clashed over proposals to combat child pornography on the internet and over negotiations on sharing information about bank transfers. The claim that the two commissioners and their teams could work together in one department looked threadbare. Splitting the department will either end the squabbling or it will allow the secretariat-general and the president’s office to referee the fights – and perhaps to decide the issues.

Inevitable split?

The field of justice and home affairs has been developing rapidly as an area of EU responsibility over the course of the last 15 years. That trend will continue – the Tampere programme was succeeded by the Hague programme, which has been supplanted by the Stockholm programme. Perhaps in another 15 years the departmental split will look as inevitable as the development from a taskforce into a fully fledged Commission department in 1999.

But appearances are deceptive: the primary impulse behind last week’s decision was people, not policy.

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