Bulgaria’s European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva will be one of three commissioners formed into a group to share some of the workload of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
 
Ashton has come under fire publicly for some of the choices she has made, for example her decision to skip an EU defence ministers meeting to attend the inauguration of Ukraine’s new president, and what critics said was her tardiness in visiting earthquake-devastated Haiti.
 
Interviewed by the BBC programme The Record Europe, Ashton said that her job – created by the Lisbon Treaty – was "built on three people’s jobs".
 
Georgieva, who is European Commissioner for International Co-operation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, will be a member of a group of "deputies" to Ashton, according to a report by Bulgarian National Radio, along with Štefan Füle, the Czech commissioner for enlargement, and Andris Piebalgs, his Latvian colleague responsible for development.
 
The three will help out when key meetings simultaneously would require Ashton to be in more than one place at a time.
 
Ashton said in the BBC interview that when she went to Haiti in March, "everybody I met said 'thank you very much for not coming when we needed the runways for aid, when we needed the roads clear to get people out'."
 
"I feel completely that I did the right thing and I would do that again," Ashton said.
 
It is possible that when the planned European Union External Action Service (EAS) is set up, as the bloc’s new diplomatic corps, further officials could stand in for Ashton in the role of deputy.
 
The EAS is a work in progress, although progress is being hampered by turf wars among European institutions, individual member states and groups of member states, according to geographic location within the EU, as well as size.
 
At a March 6 2010 Gymnich meeting of foreign ministers, Ashton said that she would put forward a proposal about the EAS at the end of April.
 
She said that it was very important that while this new body is being constructed, the efforts of all fully participating member states are united. At the same time, the role of the European Commission and of the European Parliament must also be recognised, Ashton was quoted as saying in a media statement issued after the Gymnich meeting.
 
Created by the Lisbon Treaty, the EAS will have somewhere between 5000 and 7000 staff and about 136 embassies.
In the next few weeks and months, with the most optimistic scenarios seeing the EAS set up sometime between May and June, the manner and rules for the appointment of the service’s diplomats must be finalised.
 
On March 23, the European Parliament’s committee on foreign affairs is to hold hearings on the EAS.