The harmonisation of the legal positions of the civil servants and the employees: is Labour Law also useful for civil servants? A comparative analysis of the existing legal systems.

A postdoctoral research was granted to me by the Belgian Research Foundation (FWO-FNRS) for a period of 3 years (renewable).

The research project, which has started on October 1st 2007, aims to compare the legal status of the British, the Swedish and the Italian officials (or better public employees) with the specific legal status of the officials in Belgium, and till a farther extent also in the Netherlands, France and Denmark. During my doctoral research, I conducted research to the legal foundations of the specific legal status of (public) officials in Belgium. I also compared the results of my Belgian research with the foundations of the specific legal status of the officials in the Netherlands, France and Denmark. This research pointed out that the original juridical foundations for the specific legal status of the officials were similar in all the researched countries.

The research delivered also a second important result. All of these researched countries were, till some extent, trying to merge the legal positions of the private employees with the legal status of (some) officials. These result was the direct starting point of this new research.

Three EU-countries are mainly quoted as having only a vague difference between the legal qualification of the employment relationship of "public" officials in comparison with the private employees . These three countries are the United Kingdom, Sweden and Italy. The aim of the current research (which will last for six years) is to discover whether the employment relationship of the officials within the British, the Swedish and the Italian public sector is entirely governed by the same rules as the employment relationships in the private sector. Some primary research has already shown that some differences in the three countries remain, which leads to the main research question. What are the legal foundations for the existing differences between the "public" employment relationship and the "private" employment relationship? This research question implies of course direct a second one, namely till what extent are the legal foundations in the three countries similar and till what extent are they comparable with the legal foundations which ground a specific status of the public officials in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and France? The overall aim of this research is to summarize the comparable and ongoing debate in as many EU-member states as possible since it is my opinion, based on my previous research (with Sweden as biggest exception), that most of the EU-countries are struggling with similar qualification problems. However, comparative research in this field remains almost undone, seen the apparent link between national sovereignty and employment in the public sector.

My first two research years focus on the British case. Therefore, I have spent already a research period of six weeks at the Law School of the University of Reading (in April and May 2008) during which I worked very closely together with Dr. Nicola Countouris (also Tutor at Sint John's College, Oxford). During this period, I was able to understand the uncertain legal qualification of the legal status of the English (as well as Welsh and Scottish) civil servants. The whole first research year was devoted to the understanding of the very specific legal situation of the civil servants (and till a lesser extent of all the employees working the "public sector") in the United Kingdom.

During the second year, the scope of the research on the British case should be made larger. The existing uncertainty concerning the legal status of civil servants (and of "officials") is linked with an extremely interesting ongoing debate in the UK. The legal qualification of this employment relationship is as well linked to internal constitutional issues in the UK as to the European debate concerning the demarcation of the public sector. Also, employment law related issues (e.g. the questions concerning the wrongful dismissal and the unilateral variation) should be profoundly researched as well from a British angle as from a comparative angle. It is namely exactly the possibility of unilateral variation which constitutes one of the major elements why Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Denmark retain a special legal status for their "officials".


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