EU seeks to fill 375 extra lawyer posts

The institutions of the EU have invited applications for around 375 lawyer posts to help meet the demands imposed by next year's enlargement of the EU from 15 to 25 countries, which will add 75 million to the EU population.

The European Personnel Selection Office (Epso) said these openings were part of the creation of 1,500 assistant administrator posts, also including posts in European public administration, economics and auditing.

In a separate move, Epso will shortly seek lawyer-linguists holding university degrees in Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Slovene or Slovak law, with a "perfect command" of one of these nine languages and at least two others from a specified list.

Officials said around 40 lawyer-linguists in each language were required.