The role of EU delegations in ensuring protection of EU citizens in the world

Due to budgetary constraints, several Member States had to cut down their external representations, even though the number of EU citizens travelling abroad is increasing every year. On the other hand, the EU has acquired a new diplomatic service which has a network of 140 Union delegations operating globally and making the EU better represented externally than most of the Member States. In light of these circumstances, the newly created EEAS, which has express powers of assisting the EU citizens abroad, and has proved its added value in the recent crisis that affected the Arab world, should be fully taken advantage by the Member States so as to ensure the needs of the growing number of their citizens, while saving their infrastructural costs.

At the moment, there is a wasteful duplication of consular functions between the diplomacies of the Member States and that of the EU. Several measures are proposed for consideration by the author, which might achieve both economies and greater collective effectiveness. The present paper will assess several proposals that implement the following two objectives: 1) enhancing cooperation between the Member States’ external representations, on one hand, and between the Member States’ external representations and EU’s delegations, on the other hand; and 2) entrusting more responsibilities to the EU delegations in the area of consular protection of EU citizens abroad, such as: arranging common political and economic reporting and establishing common consular premises for handling of consular assistance.