EU Prominent Public Functions

The European Union published a list of prominent public functions at national level of member countries, international organisations with headquarters in the EU and EU institutions and bodies. The list is published in the Official Journal of the European Union.

This publication does not list the names of the persons holding these positions, but only the positions themselves. It is therefore useful in constructing a benchmark of positions whose occupants ought to be identified as PEPs.

The information is formatted differently for each country, but the positions are broadly categorised as follows:

• heads of State, heads of government, ministers and deputy or assistant ministers
• members of parliament or of similar legislative bodies
• members of the governing bodies of political parties
• members of supreme courts, of constitutional courts or of other high-level judicial bodies, the decisions of which are not subject to further appeal, except in exceptional circumstances
• members of courts of auditors or of the boards of central banks
• ambassadors, chargés d'affaires and high-ranking officers in the armed forces
• members of the administrative, management or supervisory bodies of State-owned enterprises
• directors, deputy directors and members of the board or equivalent function of an international organisation

These categories can be found in EU Commission Decision of 20 May 2022 on the exact functions that qualify as prominent public functions in the European Union institutions and bodies

This dataset works towards publishing structured data of the positions listed in EU journal notice C/2023/724 as unambiguous positions which can be used to clearly identify the position held by persons in these public functions.

Since some of the positions are not clearly identified in the original document, or left as broad or generic categories, we initially only include the positions we could clearly identify as positions which exist in those countries.