Etica şi comportamentul funcţionarilor publici în UE
The Ethics of the Civil Servants in the EU

Summary/Abstract: This paper has been drawn up for the project: “Partnership for designing a model of an intelligent public management, interactive and transparent to build a more efficient local public administration in Romania” and is dealing with the ethical problems that might occur in the day to day professional activity of the civil servants in the EU countries. Owing to more complex and difficult tasks and fierce competition, the system considered to react slowly to the citizens’ needs has to be reformed and replaced with a more flexible one, easily adapting to change. Such a reform would imply vague borders between public and private, an independent management, oriented towards efficiency and performance, a less bureaucratic hierarchy, recruiting and promoting people on merit and payment according to their skills. Concepts like stability and continuity and a special status of the civil servant, in order to be protected from political influence, have become less important. Within the EU there is a great variety of types of organization of the public administration. A lot of countries still prefer traditional values and getting over to the modern model is still mistrusted. Lack of permanent control and an independent management can increase the number of infringements and not the other way round. Nevertheless, there are countries where the model is functioning very well, for example the Northern Countries. The values and principles that should guide the activity of the civil servant are: honesty, integrity, impartiality, citizen oriented, professionalism, public interest prevails personal interest, avoid conflicts of interest, openness, transparency etc. A code of ethics at European level should contain all these values and principles, and Romania has to become aware of it in making the public sector more efficient.

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