The internship at the Permanent Representation of the Czech Republic to the European Union is a job tailor-made for him. He has completed his five-year law degree and wants to specialise in energy law. “I started my internship in Brussels at a very interesting time. Not just because the Czech Republic holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council only once every thirteen and a half years, so it’s rather a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but also because of the ongoing energy crisis caused mainly by the war in Ukraine, which has had a very strong impact on the Czech Presidency,” explains Ludvík Zelinka.
He works in the energy section, which is currently one of the busiest departments in the entire Presidency office. Already in the first two months of the Presidency, Ludvík and his colleagues had a very challenging task: to prepare a new EU regulation on voluntary reduction in gas consumption.
“Due to the energy crisis, the workload in June and especially in July was extreme, because the country holding the presidency is responsible for drafting new regulations. We were responsible for all the working group meetings, communication with all twenty-seven EU countries and the European Commission, as well as for dealing with all the Member States’ comments, which can be quite diverse in scope,” says the law graduate.
Drafting EU regulation in record time
The working week for Ludvík Zelinka’s eight-member team usually consisted of all-day working group meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, preceded by a full day of research, analysis and information gathering. After the working group meetings, the team always had to prepare the minutes and executive summaries for the government in Prague, which often took several hours of editing and checking.
However, thanks to these efforts, the Czech Republic has achieved historic success and the aforementioned EU regulation was prepared in record time. Throughout the summer, representatives from other EU countries met with the Czech staff and thanked them for their hard work, which made Ludvík very happy. He believes the Czech Republic had made a good name for itself during the EU Council Presidency.
“I am very happy that thanks to the internship, I got the opportunity to look behind the scenes and see how EU law is really made. It was also a great experience for me to see all the hard diplomatic work up close – it is quite an art. I met a lot of interesting people and interns from all over the world, and I even went on a field trip with a foreign delegation to see the core of a nuclear reactor in the Temelín power station. Not many students get to see that.”
Ludvík will continue his internship until December when the Czech Presidency of the EU Council ends. Then he plans to return to the MU Faculty of Law in Brno, where he will start the new academic year as a PhD student specialising in EU law and EU energy law. The internship is thus a valuable experience that will help him with his dissertation and future career.