Brussels, 26 November 2025

Note for the attention of Mr Piotr Serafin

Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration

Subject: Concerns and delays in the implementation of the Commission Decision of 12 December 2023 on the prevention of and fight against psychological and sexual harassment in the Regulatory Agencies and Joint Undertakings

Alarming situation at F4E and CCC’s mission of 7 November

Ref.:      – Our note of 5 March 2025 to your attention
– Your note of 15 April 2025 to my attention

1. Our note of 5 March 2025 to your attention

By our letter of 5 March ( link ), we drew your attention to the serious concerns and persistent delays affecting the implementation by the Regulatory Agencies and Joint Undertakings (JUs) of the Commission Decision of 12 December 2023 (“the Decision”) on the prevention of and fight against psychological and sexual harassment.

We emphasised that, while we appreciate the patience and efforts of our colleagues in DG HR regarding the difficult and burdensome discussions underway in the framework of the Article 110 Staff Regulations procedure, it remains unacceptable that this adoption process is still unresolved two years after the Decision was adopted.

We also stressed that we were nevertheless reassured by the fact that any attempt to circumvent or weaken the Decision would ultimately be set aside, since, under Article 110, you hold the final responsibility for approving or rejecting the proposed amendments.

On that occasion, we further highlighted the gravity of the crisis in which F4E has been plunged for far too long, a crisis requiring, within the strengthened governance framework decided by the Commission, your particular attention and that of Commissioner Jørgensen.

2. Your note of 15 April 2025 to my attention

We warmly thank you for your reply ( link ).

We were very pleased to note your clear commitment to ensuring that staff working in decentralised agencies and JUs will benefit from the same protections and guarantees as Commission staff under the new Decision, particularly regarding the role of the independent Chief Confidential Counsellor (CCC).

We have particularly appreciated your “commitment to providing continued support from the Commission to F4E and other agencies in particularly difficult situations”. 

3. CCC’s mission at F4E on 7 November – first such mission ever carried out in a decentralised Agency or JU

In this respect, colleagues at F4E and ourselves were delighted to see your commitments directly implemented — and sincerely grateful to you — that the Commission’s CCC visited F4E on 7 November to meet staff and management.

The overwhelmingly positive feedback from F4E staff confirms a simple truth: as we had repeatedly stressed, the CCC’s intervention was urgent and indispensable.

Staff confidence in F4E’s internal harassment-handling mechanisms had not merely eroded, it had entirely collapsed.

Procedures were widely perceived as lacking impartiality, diligence, and legal certainty. Many refrained from filing complaints, and those who did often regretted it due to the absence of meaningful follow-up.

As we as we had repeatedly stressed, only a robust, external, independent mechanism could restore even a minimum level of trust.

The CCC now provides that indispensable anchor for F4E staff as well and we are sincerely grateful to you for having ensured this outcome.

On the one hand, as evidenced in her recently published Annual Activity Report, the CCC has now unquestionably become the central reference point and driving force of the Commission’s strengthened framework for preventing and combating all forms of harassment, with 444 colleagues turning to her for assistance.

This very positive outcome offers a compelling confirmation of the wisdom and foresight behind the proposal to establish this role – a proposal that we advanced together with our colleagues from Harassment Watch Network – drawing on the recognised positive experience of the World Bank and on the expertise of the multidisciplinary team of high-level specialists mobilised by R&D federal, as the main trade union for European civil servants.

It is also with the support of these experts that we have been able not only to successfully defend victims of harassment, workplace violence and toxic management in OLAF and IDOC investigations across EU institutions, Agencies and JUs, but also to organise numerous conferences and webinars ( link )— including at F4E — with the dual objective of raising awareness of the failures of the current policy and putting forward well-substantiated proposals to finally establish a genuine and comprehensive occupational risk-prevention policy.

On the other hand, the fact that the CCC’s first-ever mission in a decentralised agency or JU took place at F4E, even before the formal adoption of the Decision, sends a clear and unambiguous message: the situation at F4E has reached a level of seriousness that can no longer be minimised, denied, or concealed.

It is now equally important that the CCC be able to visit other Agencies and JUs as well.

4. Statements by the F4E Director to Politico

We took note of the recent statements made by the F4E Director in reaction to the Politico article “Fear and Loathing at a Barcelona-based Agency – From bad to worse”, in which he claimed to have “discussed the Pulse survey results with staff and outlined measures including boosting training, launching an independent review of the agency’s anti-harassment policy, inviting the Commission’s Chief Confidential Counsellor Lene Naesager CCC to the site.”

Statements noted and appreciated.

However, it remains profoundly troubling that several years after the tragic suicide of our colleague, and after years of self-congratulatory proclamations of “zero tolerance” and “exemplary procedures”, F4E continues to show catastrophic Pulse survey results:

• 77% interpersonal conflicts
• 9.9% psychological violence
• 7.3% sexual harassment
• 4.7% physical violence

Moreover, announcing discussions on these results while still refusing to provide department-level data, which we have duly requested, is just incompatible with the transparency repeatedly claimed. As experts confirm, such disaggregated data are essential for identifying risks and applying targeted corrective measures.

It is equally troubling that discussions still revolve around emergency training roll-outs and yet another “independent review” of a policy long described as flawless.

However, at F4E, it is not procedures that fail, it is the refusal to enforce them. Without the will to act, even the best safeguards are nothing but words on paper.

Still, we gladly acknowledge that F4E now finally recognises the seriousness of the failures we have been denouncing for years — a seriousness previously denied by asserting that our analyses were entirely unfounded and based merely on a “common misconception”.

However, years of failures, questionable interpretations, systematic delays, ignored survey results — including the worst levels of distrust in senior management ever recorded in a European institution — chronic shortcomings in the protection of victims, endless internal investigations, the contempt shown for the findings of external inquiries, and repeated appeals to “protect F4E’s institutional credibility” as a pretext for enforcing a law of silence cannot be swept away by statements issued so late, however carefully crafted they may be.

Restoring trust and credibility is not a communication exercise with positions that are entirely changeable depending on what suits at the time. It requires leadership, responsibility, accountability, and effective governance.

Trust is not restored by tone. It is restored only by effective action.

5. What F4E should have done concerning the implementation of the Decision — and refused to do

In this respect, we had expected the F4E Director — finally providing genuine leadership by example, fully aware of the seriousness of the situation, and following the clear and commendable example set by the Directors of the Executive Agencies — to immediately take the lead in requesting the application mutatis mutandis of the Decision and formally ask the Commission to grant F4E staff immediate access to the Commission’s CCC, irrespective of the position taken by other Agencies and JUs.

Such an initiative, far beyond the usual slogans and the even more frequent self-congratulatory exercises, would have constituted a clear and unequivocal signal of a genuine cultural shift at F4E, and could have meaningfully contributed to restoring staff confidence. This did not happen.

Instead, F4E chose to resist, to coordinate opposition among agencies, to misrepresent the views of staff representatives, and to cling to claims about the “excellence” of its procedures and a “zero-tolerance” narrative now conclusively disproven, even going so far as to accuse us of « not grasping the legal aspects of the adoption procedure ». This was not an insult to us; it was simply an insult to reason.

It should be emphasised that, for R&D, the objective was never to simply “export” to the Agencies and JUs a Decision negotiated in a vacuum, detached from the realities in which their colleagues work and from the concrete difficulties they confront. From the outset — in drafting our proposals and throughout the entire negotiation process — we deliberately integrated the contributions and concerns raised by colleagues in the Agencies and JUs, and we grounded our positions in the hard lessons learned from the cases we defended, including the most emblematic and troubling ones at F4E. We have always emphasised that, in matters of preventing and combating all forms of harassment, the Commission must ensure that the staff of executive and decentralised Agencies and JUs benefit from exactly the SAME support and high level of protection, the SAME quality and effectiveness of procedures, and the SAME competence and independence of the investigators responsible for handling such cases.

Particularly alarming were the repeated, entirely baseless — and frankly indefensible — assertions that applying the Decision would eliminate confidential counsellors (CCs)!  This claim flies in the face of the Decision itself, which refers to CCs 69 times, strengthens their independence, and places them under CCC coordination. Even more troubling, this fiction continued to be promoted even after the Commission, in implementing the Decision, appointed its 25 CCs.

This absurd position — legally baseless, institutionally incoherent, and at times devoid of even the most elementary sense of decency — adopted and actively publicised by F4E with the clear intention of rallying other Agencies and JUs against the implementation of the Decision, obliged us to organise dedicated webinars and to address an overwhelming number of questions and concerns from colleagues and staff representatives seeking reassurance that the CCs would, in fact, be maintained.

In the end, F4E now claims to have supported the Decision from the very beginning. The sequence of events allows anyone to evaluate that claim for what it truly is.

A telling illustration of a self-referential governance culture that systematically evades accountability – one that continually rewrites history and portrays itself as unfailingly on the side of reason, while freely dispensing criticism, pressure and unfounded allegations to everyone but itself.

6. F4E’s crisis is, above all, a governance issue

Our requests for Commission support were portrayed and strongly criticized as attempts to place F4E under “unacceptable and constant supervision by the Commission”.

In reality, it was F4E’s refusal to implement the Decision that placed it under scrutiny, nothing else.

Indeed, only genuine, measurable and irreversible improvements in governance, managerial accountability and institutional culture will allow F4E to emerge from a crisis that has lasted far too long.

As we have consistently argued, the crisis at F4E stems from a governance model that has proven structurally inadequate and poorly implemented, a crisis clearly beyond the capacity of F4E management and DG ENER, as parent DG, to resolve, despite the highly appreciated involvement of Mr Garribba as Commission representative on the F4E Board.

It is now essential to visibly reinforce the efforts of the central services of our institution to finally resolve a crisis that has lasted far too long.

We therefore rely on you to ensure that the CCC’s mission at F4E is not the end, nor the beginning of the end but only the end of the beginning.

Conclusion

(1) Fast adoption of the anti-harassment Decision by Agencies and JUs

Firstly, we thank you once again for the attention given to our concerns and call on your political impetus to ensure that the ongoing Article 110 discussions are concluded without further delay, so that colleagues in Agencies and JUs may benefit from the protection they deserve — including the possibility, as now for F4E staff, to rely on the assistance and protection of the CCC.

This is what the staff concerned is requesting and has asked us to convey to you.

(2) What is at stake is also the reputation and external credibility of F4E and, by extension, of the Commission.

Secondly, the urgent managerial and operational change required at F4E — which can only be possible thanks your and Commissioner Jørgensen’ political impetus, goes beyond the essential protection of staff and respect for individual rights, essential though they are.

Staff and EU citizens want and deserve a strong and credible F4E capable not only of delivering its crucial current missions but also of going beyond its present mandate.

What is at stake is:

• F4E’s institutional credibility,
• the wider credibility of the Commission,
• trust in F4E’s ability to fulfil its essential mandate, especially regarding ITER,
• and its future role within the Union’s fusion strategy.

An organisation with such important responsibilities, and that rightly seeks to expand them, must FIRST demonstrate exemplary governance, always and in all aspects.

Nothing less is acceptable.

(3) Strengthening the Commission’s governance vis-à-vis Agencies and JUs and making more efficient Article 110 procedure

Thirdly, the still unresolved F4E crisis and the so protracted discussions on the adoption of the Decision, despite the commendable efforts of DG HR’ colleagues, demonstrate the need to strengthen:

• the effectiveness of the Article 110 procedure,
• the governance role of the Commission vis-à-vis Agencies and JUs and the visibility, promptness and efficiency of support from Commission’s central services to parent DGs.

Never again “too little, too late”.

The reform of the current governance must ensure that major crises as the long-standing one at F4E are confronted by the parent DGs and the Commission’s central services immediately and resolutely.

Any failure to do so places an intolerable burden on staff and inflicts lasting harm on the trust and reputation that the Institution has a duty to safeguard both internally and externally — harm that, once done, is extraordinarily difficult to repair.

We are confident that these concerns will be duly addressed and that concrete proposals will emerge from the workstream on Offices and Agencies chaired by Ms Rouche. Insofar as the goal is to achieve shared objectives with the staff, the presence of their representatives within the workstream can only be beneficial.

Cristiano Sebastiani,

President

Copy:

Mr B. Seibert, Head of Cabinet of the President

Mr D. Jørgensen, Commissioner Energy and Housing

Mr G. Radziejewski, Head of Cabinet; Ms A. Carrero, Member of Cabinet of Commissioner Serafin

Mr M. Engell-Rossen, Head of Cabinet of Commissioner Jørgensen

Ms L. Naesager, Chief confidential Counsellor

Ms I. Juhansone, Secretary-General; Mr P. Leardini, Deputy Secretary-General

Mr S. Quest, Director-General DG HR; Mr C. Roques, Deputy Director-General; Mr C. Linder, Director F;

Ms M. Silva Mendes, Mr L. Duluc – DG HR

Ms D. Juul-Joergensen, DG ENER Director-General; Mr M. Coppola DG ENER

Mr M. Garribba, Deputy Director-General – DG ENER and Commission’ representative in the F4E’ Governing Board

Ms P. Rouch, Leader of workstream on Offices and agencies,

M. Lachaise, Director Fusion for Energy (F4E)

Harassment Watch Network

Mr A. Katsogiannis CSC

AASC

Staff

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