The sight was a highly unusual one: rows of European Union civil servants on a pedestrian island between two EU headquarters in central Brussels, gathered around a home-made protest banner reading “EU Staff for Immediate Ceasefire”. On either side the demonstrators held up printed messages reading “Civil Servants Demand Ceasefire in Gaza”.
It was the latest incident in which unhappiness among officials in western countries over their leaders’ position on Israel’s invasion of Gaza has driven some into rare public demonstrations of dissent as the horror at the civilian death toll and humanitarian disaster mounts.
This culminated with a joint statement organised by staff of the EU, Netherlands, and the United States last month entitled: It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments’ Policies Are Wrong. It claimed the signatures of some 800 civil servants across 16 countries in Europe and North America.
The question of whether civil servants should protest at all is divisive. Some view it as a violation of the common international norms according to which civil servants should be impartial and apolitical and stand apart from public debate.
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Others, however, see speaking out in this case as an ethical duty that is in line with their greater imperative to uphold the law. Such civil servants view the public protest as a last resort after efforts to express their concerns directly to their superiors have had no effect.
The transatlantic statement laid out this reasoning, stating that “we have the duty to respect, protect and uphold our constitutions and international and national legal obligations which our democratically-elected executives have committed us to” and noting that the expectation of civil servants is to “respect, serve and uphold the law”.
The statement declared that the civil servants’ “professional concerns were overruled by political and ideological considerations”, and that it was their duty to warn the public, drawing on the recent order by the International Court of Justice which instructed Israel to take every possible measure to avoid genocidal acts.
“There is a plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide,” the statement read.
It was just the latest in multiple letters signed by EU civil servants to protest at the policy of their bosses. Hundreds signed a letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in October. The following month a letter to the heads of EU institutions used an internal EU staff system to collect 2,200 signatures.
When Belgium assumed the EU presidency in January the civil servants wrote again, urging Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo to ensure that the EU fulfils “its own legal obligations”. This was the crux of the issue for one EU civil servant involved in organising the letters and protests: legal consistency.
“I’m not being political. Regardless of what political power I serve I will expect them to uphold the same standards,” the official said. “Our leaders are not following the treaty obligations themselves.”
EU civil servants have the job of telling others to uphold the rule of law, whether it’s the government of Hungary or Sudan. A failure to hold Israel to the rule of law is “making our lives extremely difficult as civil servants”, the official said. “I think in many ways we have the moral duty to speak, but also the professional duty to speak up.”
Open protests by civil servants in the Netherlands over the invasion of Gaza and high-profile resignations of diplomats in Europe and the US have provoked public debate on what the tradition of civil servant impartiality means. What is forbidden is not always clearly defined, and can vary depending on the country and the issue at stake.
The code of behaviour issued by Ireland’s Standards in Public Office Commission lays out specific rules for different grades of civil servants, noting that “restrictions have traditionally been imposed on civil servants engaging in political activity to ensure public confidence in the political impartiality of the Civil Service”.
The call to action that summoned the EU civil servants to the protest outside headquarters reassured those who might want to attend that they were not breaking any rules.
As might be expected for EU civil servants, this argument was laid out rigorously and backed up with attached annexes. It noted that staff have the right to freedom of expression under staff regulations, and referred to EU guidelines on promoting compliance with international humanitarian law that were approved by the member states in 2009. “You are only asking for the EU to give effect to what the International Court of Justice has ordered,” the email read.