""I can say very clearly 'no'", says Mary Robinson (Photo: United Nations)
Provided the treaty is ratified in all member states, EU leaders will in the coming months have to decide who should be appointed to the top positions of EU president and foreign minister, as well as European Commission president.
""I can say very clearly 'no'", says Mary Robinson (Photo: United Nations)
Ms Robinson said she was aware her name had been floated by some – such as EU communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom – as a possible female candidate for one of the posts, but stressed she is not interested.
"I can say very clearly 'no'," she told EUobserver on Monday (9 June) in the margins of a discussion in the parliament on human rights.
"I don't see myself taking any role of a political nature anymore either in Europe or anywhere else," she also told MEPs in the sub-committee for human rights.
Ms Robinson was Ireland's first woman president – from 1990 to 1997 – and a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002.
She is also one of the 12 members of a group of "Elders" set up last July by former South African president and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, his wife Graca Machel (an international advocate for women's and children's rights) and South African cleric and apartheid opponent Desmond Tutu "to contribute their wisdom, independent leadership and integrity to tackle some of the world's toughest problems."
"To become an elder is curiously probably the role that I will most try to live up to because it is moral leadership; it has nothing to do with institutional power. It is just trying to be a voice and I think most of my preoccupation is with those who are most marginalized in the world," Ms Robinson said.
Her statement comes as some people have questioned why no women's names have been mentioned as possible candidates for the EU's top jobs.
Commissioner Wallstrom in February told a Swedish daily she was fed up with the "reign of old men" in the bloc as "humanity consists of fifty per cent women." In recent days, an online petition has been set up by Danish Socialist MEP Christel Schaldemose aimed at gathering a million signatures pushing for a greater gender balance in the jobs.
So far, only men have been mentioned in various quarters as likely candidates, notably Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, former British prime minister Tony Blair; Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt and Jose Manuel Barroso, the current commission president.
