President calls on parties to back civil service reform

President Nicos Anastasiades urged political parties on Thursday to approve the government’s proposal for the reform of the civil service in a bid to rid the country of a system that allows nepotism.

Receiving the civil service commission’s (Edy) report at the presidential palace, Anastasiades said adoption of the reform would significantly contribute to establishing a recruitment and promotion system based on measurable criteria, knowledge and excellence.

This is what the country needs to abandon the systems of the past that allowed interventions, he added.

“I say this despite feeling that Edy carries out an important task, without discriminations, but to eliminate any possibility, the right thing is to adopt the civil service reform,” the president said.

This will be the administration’s second attempt to introduce much-needed reforms in the island’s civil service.

The bills provide for a new evaluation system to replace the current one under which most civil servants are deemed ‘exceptional’.

It also introduces provisions for high ranking officials who will go through an examination process when seeking promotion rather than the present procedure by which they are promoted according to years of service.

Cyprus has repeatedly been urged by the EU to adopt reforms to improve the efficiency of the public sector in particular as regards public administration, governance of state-owned entities and local government.

Opposition parties rejected the previous raft of bills in December 2016 arguing that they did not go far enough to correct the distortions and did not live up to expectations.

A couple of months before the vote, the government had said that the political environment was not conducive, as the bills which aimed at addressing recruitment, evaluation, and promotion of civil servants, their pay and the transfer of workers from departments with excess staff to others needing workers, touched certain taboos.

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