EU, Azerbaijan to jointly upgrade public administration system

Baku hosted presentation of a twinning project “Support for Continuation of Reforms in the State Service System of Azerbaijan” on February 14.

The goal of the project is to support public administration in Azerbaijan, ensure exchange of best practices and assist in adaptation of national legislation to the EU standards.

Partners in the project are the State Secretariat of Lithuania and Azerbaijan’s NEC.

Maleyka Abbaszade, the chair of the board of the directors of the National Examinations Center (NEC) said that the two-year project aspires to contribute to greater development of the professional and stable civil service system in Azerbaijan, in accordance with the best practices of Europe.

She said that the project aims at increasing the potential of the NEC, and its fruitful activities, creating new job classification system and ensuring recruitment for public service in accordance with this system, as well as evaluating the performance of public servants.

The process of admission to public service should be simplified, it is necessary to ensure efficiency, Abbaszade stressed.

“Necessary work will be carried out in the country in this direction,” she said, adding that currently, ensuring the transparency of the admission process for public service has increased the interest in this issue.

"The reforms in the admission process will serve the improvement of the civil service and professionalism. The current situation in the public service admission allows to say that clear opportunities have been created for recruitment of citizens. Relationship between citizen-officer has been minimized at all stages. But this process must be continued. In addition, admission to the civil service should be accessible to all citizens,” she explained.

In turn, Head of the EU Delegation in Azerbaijan Malena Mard said that the budget of the project to be funded by the EU is 1.2 million manats (about $679,000).

Stressing that the public service requires constant development, Mard said that European partners will work with Azerbaijan for two years and make recommendations on the project.

"Over the past 10 years, the EU has implemented in Azerbaijan 47 twinning projects. I hope that their numbers will reach 50 until the end of the year,” she said.

The EU mission head further told reporters that a new agreement to be signed between the EU and Azerbaijan will help further strengthen and broaden the bilateral cooperation.

“The EU believes that the next round of talks with Azerbaijan will be more substantive,” she said, recalling that negotiations on the new agreement started off in Brussels on February 7.

“At the first meeting we tried to finds solutions to a number of technical issues. I believe the next round of the negotiations will be more substantive. We aim to discuss a number of areas including energy, economy, trade, relations between people, state administration, etc.,” said Mard.

Mard went on saying that the EU bears a lot of ambitious plans for the forthcoming agreement between the two parties. She emphasized that the European side would like to see the upcoming agreement to embrace many different spheres of cooperation including economic, trade, good governance and humanitarian ties.

In November 2016, the European Council adopted a mandate for the European Commission and the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy to negotiate on behalf of the EU and its member states, a comprehensive agreement with Azerbaijan.

The agreement will follow the principles endorsed in the 2015 review of the European Neighborhood Policy and offer a renewed basis for political dialogue and mutually beneficial cooperation between the EU and Azerbaijan.

The new agreement envisages the compliance of Azerbaijan’s legislation and procedures with the EU’s most important international trade norms and standards, which should lead to the improvement of Azerbaijani goods’ access to the EU markets.

Azerbaijan has become a country of direct priority to the EU’s strategy in its wider neighborhood since the last enlargement of the European Union in 2007. Azerbaijan affects Europe’s interests, mainly in a regional energy strategy.