Polish EU mission to become permanent from April

In April the Polish EU mission in Brussels will become permanent and will have representatives of all Warsaw's ministries. Current EU members and candidate countries are to sign an accession treaty in Athens in three weeks. This means that Poland will take part in all ongoing Union projects, but will have no voting rights until May 2004. "We already receive hundreds of pages of documents from the EU each day and will soon be forced to take a stand on many issues to be discussed in less than a week," said Polish EU ambassador Marek Grela. However, the new mission will have only 70 employees - half as many as that of Spain, a country with a similar population. Grela admitted that the government simply could not spend more, and that the salaries of those employed would not be comparable with those paid by the European Commission. (Rzeczpospolita, p. A9) M.M.