‘The British, Irish and Australasian Ombudsmen Model: Expansion, Contraction and New Horizons.’

This Chapter is a Romanian translation of: ‘The British, Irish and Australasian Ombudsmen Model: Expansion, Contraction and New Horizons,’ a paper presented to Annual Conference of the European Group of Public Administration, Permanent Study Group X: Law and Public Administration, 5 September, 2008, and revised October 2011.This Chapter is derived from the authors’ project ‘Public Services Ombudsmen and Administrative Justice: Models, Roles, Methods and Relationships’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. In this study we supplemented research of the literature on the ombudsmen (annual reports, investigation reports, speeches and articles) with interviews with over 20 ombudsmen (see schedule) who deal with public services in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. We also interviewed some private sector ombudsmen, auditors and, in the UK, some complaints handlers intermediate between an agency and the public services ombudsman. In this Chapter we consider the roles that are being performed by the Public Services Ombudsmen (PSO) in our study and the methods that they have adopted to perform those roles. This leads us to speculate that in practice the roles of the PSO may be expanding, and there are new horizons to explore in the ombudsman community.Economic and Social Research Council: award RES-000-22-2133