European Union - Delegation of the European Commission to Japan

A Community agency is a body governed by European public law; it is distinct from the Community Institutions (Council, Parliament, Commission, etc.) and has its own legal personality. It is set up by an act of secondary legislation in order to accomplish a very specific technical, scientific or managerial task which is specified in the relevant Community act.

There is nothing new about the creation of decentralised Community bodies, since the first agencies (the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training and the Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions) date from the 1970s.

However, in the 1990s and in the dynamics of the finalisation of the internal market, a series of new agencies appeared, giving a new dimension to what constitutes a Community model of European agencies at present. These so-called second generation agencies were an answer to a desire for geographical devolution and the need to cope with new tasks of a technical and/or scientific nature. The majority of them started their activities in 1994 or 1995, after a decision by the Heads of State and Government in Brussels on 29 October, 1993, which fixed the headquarters of seven agencies, some of which had already seen their basic regulation adopted by the Council several years previously.

In December 2003, the Heads of State and Government again decided on the seats of a number of agencies, some of which were already functioning with Brussels as their provisional seat. This group of agencies can be called the "3rd generation".

The objectives of the individual agencies are many and varied. Each agency is indeed unique and fulfils an individual function defined at the time of its creation. This function might be modified in the future but, nevertheless, there are a number of general aims underlying an agency's operation as a whole:

1. they introduce a degree of decentralisation and dispersal to the Community's activities;
2. they give a higher profile to the tasks that are assigned to them by identifying them with the agencies themselves;
3. some answer the need to develop scientific or technical know-how in certain well-defined fields;
4. others have the role to integrate different interest groups and thus to facilitate the dialogue at a European (between the social partners, for example) or international level.

At present, the European Community agencies are:

Common Foreign and Security Policy agencies

Police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters agencies

Executive agencies

Agencies of the European Union