The Ombudsman: The Idea and Its Origin

In one line

An ombudsman is an independent officer who investigates complaints of maladministration against the administration, reports his findings and recommends redress, and his authority is his independence and his publicity rather than any power to compel.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the ombudsman is an institution of Scandinavian origin, established in Sweden in 1809, whose essential features are appointment by and reporting to the legislature rather than the executive, independence of the administration he investigates, access without cost or formality, investigation of maladministration, and the power to recommend rather than to decide, backed by the publication of his findings.

The idea

The problem it answers. A citizen wronged by the administration has a court and a departmental complaint. The court is expensive, slow and confined to legality: it can quash a decision that was outside the law and can do nothing about one that was lawful, rude, dilatory or stupid. The departmental complaint goes to the department. Between them there is a gap, and the ombudsman occupies it.

Maladministration. The word covers what falls into that gap: bias, neglect, inattention, delay, incompetence, ineptitude, perversity, turpitude and arbitrariness. It is wider than illegality and narrower than dissatisfaction.

The five essential features.

Independence. Appointed by the legislature or on the recommendation of a body the executive does not control, with security of tenure and a salary charged on the public fund.

Accessibility. A complaint costs nothing, needs no lawyer and requires no form.

Investigation. Power to obtain documents, to require answers and to enter premises.

Recommendation, not decision. He reports and recommends; the department decides. This is the feature students most often misstate.

Publicity. His reports go to the legislature and are public. That is the sanction.

The history

Sweden, 1809, where the Justitieombudsman was created by the Constitution to supervise the observance of the laws by judges and officials on behalf of the Riksdag.

Finland, Denmark and Norway followed in the twentieth century, and the Danish model of 1955 is the one most other countries copied.

New Zealand, 1962, the first common law country, and the United Kingdom in 1967, where the office is called the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration and access is through a Member of Parliament rather than direct.

And the spread since, to well over a hundred countries, with variants: sectoral ombudsmen for banking, insurance and telecommunications, and specialised ones for prisons, for children and for the armed forces.

The Indian adaptation, and how it differs

The Indian institutions are called the Lokpal at the Union level and the Lokayukta in the States, and the names were proposed by the Administrative Reforms Commission, which recommended the institution in its interim report on problems of redress of citizens' grievances in 1966.