Interested in the organisational work of a Council Presidency? If yes, you may want to listen to the recordings of the 4th bloggers meeting with Hungarian Presidency in Brussels.

Having participated in that meeting on the organisation of meetings in the Council and the interpretation regimes of these meetings, I found it most interesting that according to Benö Modok from the Hungarian Presidency team it was surprising to them how much work it is actually to organise Council meetings  that usually seem to be given for non-presidency member states.

Equally interesting was the fact that there is no handbook on how to run a presidency and that everything is learned through personal contacts with previous presidencies, the Council secretariat and the Commission how to run the organisation. Yet, having this organisational role in their hands was seen as important to shape the agenda during the presidency.

I also didn’t expect that interpretation had to be booked so much in advance (~6-8 weeks) and that this limits, to a certain extend, the flexibility in rescheduling meetings in the Council.

Altogether, the the two parts of the recording are one hour in total, and – despite the not perfect quality of the recording – I find that this is an hour well spent for anyone interested in the “behind the scenes” of a Council Presidency.