This WEEK in the European Union

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton will also participate in the event.

The Europeans will use the opportunity to try and pin down the names for the first permanent president of the European council and the high representative for foreign affairs - posts created by the Lisbon Treaty which comes into force on 1 December. Following these talks, the Swedish EU presidency is expected to call for an extraordinary summit next week or even as soon as this Thursday (12 November).

Frontrunners for the duo of jobs are Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy for the presidency and British foreign secretary David Miliband for the foreign minister job. At the special summit, EU leaders will also discuss the composition and job descriptions for Jose Manuel Barroso's new team of commissioners.

On the economic front, finance and economy ministers will gather on Tuesday (10 November) to further discuss the impact of stimulus packages on the public finances, as most EU countries have seen their deficits spinning out of control. Norway, which is not an EU member but participates in the bloc's internal market, will see its finance minister Sigbjorn Johnsen also attending the meeting.

The talks are one day ahead of the commission's assessments of the national measures undertaken by France, Greece, Ireland, Spain and the UK to curb their deficits. A further nine countries will get clear deadlines for bringing their budget gaps under EU's three percent threshold - Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Ministers will also try to agree on administrative co-operation in the field of taxation and on political guidelines regarding VAT treatment of postal services.

Meanwhile, the European Court of Auditors will on Tuesday present its report on the way the EU budget was managed in 2008. For 14 years in a row, the Court refused give a clean bill of health to the EU accounts, because of the high number of errors. The trend of the error rate is decreasing, but last year the auditors still found "disproportionately large error rates" in rural development programmes managed by member states.

The European Parliament will convene for a mini-plenary session starting on Wednesday (11 November) with former Czech President Vaclav Havel speaking on the 20 years of free and democratic eastern European countries. A discussion between the President of the EU legislature, Jerzy Buzek, and an audience of 89 people born in November 1989 is also scheduled that day.

On the same day, the EU executive is to table proposals on how member states can better share criminal evidence and on introducing common standards in gathering them. The existing rules in this field are overlapping and confusing for police and prosecutors. Cross-border co-operation in this field is still minimal, as there are no common standards or clear deadlines to submitting criminal evidence to another member state.