Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-27-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20051027.3.4-015"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Diamandouros, I welcome the Ombudsman’s report and would also like to express the warmest congratulations to my colleague Mr Mavrommatis on his draft.
There is little doubt that the Ombudsman is one of the most important aids to securing the citizen’s position in his dealings with the institutions. Whenever people have dealings with large administrative units, an independent, straightforward and, above all, free external monitor is indispensable. I do not suppose it is accidental that it was the Scandinavian states that acquired such an instrument at a very early stage and that thought was given as early as the 1970s to establishing such an office in the Community, something that was eventually accomplished by the Treaty of Maastricht.
The original idea was that the European Ombudsman would have a role as a parliamentary commissioner who would mainly advise and monitor, but the developments in practice have been speedy and have meant that the Ombudsman of today acts as the external monitor for European public administration and highlights recurrent abuses.
Look at the figures for complaints and you find a constant increase, but, as I see it, the primary significance of that is not that European administration has become worse, but that more and more members of the public are endeavouring to assert their rights. That makes it less significant that inadmissible complaints have remained at a constant high level, amounting to some 70-75% on average. What they do indicate is that someone believes they have been on the receiving end of unfair treatment and wants to do something about it.
If dealing with these things is not a permanent feature of daily life, finding the correct form is not always easy, and people ask themselves such questions as: ‘Have I supplied a full description of the facts of the case?’ ‘What, in real terms, makes me feel that I have a complaint?’ ‘Which right has been violated?’ ‘Which institution should take action?’ What the inadmissible complaints should really do, then, is to present us with an opportunity to think about how we can create systems that offer the public a clear and cogent answer or the beginnings of a solution, both quickly and without red tape.
It is for these reasons that the Ombudsman’s efforts to create closer networks among the national complaints offices and between them and himself deserve our wholehearted support, as do his efforts at improving communication. It is by these means alone that we will meet the citizen where he is at the moment, and will be able to allay some of his fears of a Community that is still, alas, largely a faceless entity. There are things that it is very definitely incumbent on the EU to do in this respect: it needs to improve administration, make for more transparency, speedier processes and easier access to the law, not least through non-judicial instruments such as the Ombudsman himself, as well as, of course, this House’s Committee on Petitions.
For that reason, too, I am not particularly happy about the section in the draft report headed ‘Reflections on developments in the Ombudsman's role’ in which there is reference to the present time when ‘a debate is in progress on the failure on the part of European institutions and national governments to educate the peoples of the Union, following the twin referendum failures in France and the Netherlands on the European Constitutional Treaty’, and more of the same besides.
What is this saying? What is at issue here, surely, is not so much a failure to educate as the question of how we can improve the Community’s communications and policies. This is not about our didactic proclamation from on high of things that the population at large do not support.
In this sense, what this report presents us with is both an inventory analysis and a mission, a mission not only to lay down improved rules that will enjoy public support, but also, and at the same time, to ensure that they are properly enforced, while equipping one of these instruments, namely the Ombudsman, with the powers and responsibilities he will need to perform his monitoring role independently, without reference to the courts, free of charge and in a citizen-friendly manner."@en1
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