On November 15, the third informal meeting of the Polish Resilience Council (RC) took place after two earlier sessions in April and July. The next meeting, early 2025, will be the first formal, inaugural meeting.
MFA
The Polish Resilience Council is linked to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). This year, within the MFA, a FIMI plenipotentiary was appointed and a Department of Strategic Communication and Counteracting International Disinformation was founded. The inauguration of the Resilience Council is the next step in setting up a structure to counter FIMI. This is not to say that countering FIMI is a task solely for the MFA. The idea is to involve other ministries and to de-silo the domain.
Member selection
Within the structure of my recent thought experiment, the Polish RC is to be a national advisory RC composed of experts, in this case, representatives of NGOs and public academic institutions.
The selection of the members is implemented step by step. First, NGOs and public academic institutions could express their interest in the RC on the MFA website – over 100 organisations did so. Then, they were then invited to send representatives to the third informal meeting, both offline and online. The next step is these organisations proposing a physical person as a candidate member, filling out a form, and fulfilling the requirement of having the support of at least five relevant organisations, of which a minimum of one is to be a public academic institution. The support claim needs to be backed up by documents signed by a person legally authorized to represent the organisation. The deadline for submitting the form is December 15. After the deadline, those who have fulfilled the requirements and have passed a security check will be installed as members of the RC.
RC specs
The general RC is to meet every two months, while specialised subgroups could meet every two weeks. The RC is to cooperate with a next RC that is to be linked to the Polish Ministry of Digitalisation. This RC is to focus mainly on DSA-related domains. The legislation underpinning this second RC is expected to be passed in Parliament before the end of the year. The relation between the two RCs is yet to be established.
My role
Although the activities by the members of the MFA RC will be performed on a voluntary basis, the interest by organisations to propose potential members is substantial.
I will not compete for a spot. I opt for the role of observer. This role enables me to independently draft a set of best practices and lessons learned that will be useful for setting up RCs in other EU countries.
