Europarlementariërs positief over jaarverslag Europese Ombudsman 2006 (en)

MEPs adopted a report on the activities of the European Ombudsman in 2006 - Mr Nikoforos Diamandouros. The report says that the Ombudsman has continued to exercise his powers in a balanced and energetic way both with regard to examining and handling complaints, and conducting and concluding enquiries, and with regard to maintaining constructive relations with the European Union's institutions and encouraging citizens to avail themselves of their rights in relation to those institutions.

Slothful, negligent or lacking in transparency

The House agrees that the term 'maladministration by the Community' should be broadly interpreted so as to include not only unlawful administrative acts or infringements of binding legal rules or principles, but also, for example, cases where the administrative authorities have been slothful, negligent or lacking in transparency or have infringed other principles of good administration.

European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO)

The report calls on the European Personnel Selection Office to ensure it complies effectively and fully with the rules and established practice as regards the openness and transparency of competition procedures, particularly with regard to candidates' access to information relating to them about the marking of papers, to put an end to linguistic discrimination and to refrain from evading its own responsibilities by reference to decisions made by selection boards.

Examination of the statistics

The figures for 2006 record that the Ombudsman received 3830 complaints, 2% fewer than in 2005, but at the same record level attained in 2004, which represented a 53% increase compared to previous years. A complaint was transmitted electronically in 57% of cases, most of which, i.e. 3619 cases, were sent by individual citizens, and only 211 of which were submitted by associations or firms. The nationality of the authors, in descending order was: Spanish (20.4%), German (14%), French (8.7%), Belgian (6.3%), Polish (6%), Italian (5.4%) and British (3.8%). This ranking changes, however, if the percentage of complaints submitted by a country is divided by the percentage of the EU population it represents. On this calculation, in only 22 countries is the quotient greater than one; a ratio greater than one indicates that the country in questions submits more complaints to the Ombudsman than might be expected given the size of its population, as in the case of Luxembourg (with a quotient of 14.2), Malta (10), Cyprus (7.6), Belgium (2.8), Slovenia (2.7) and Spain (2.2). Turning to the question of language distribution of complaints, English and Spanish each account for over 20% of complaints, German and French each account for over 10% and Polish for over 5%.

In the 95% of cases where the examination of admissibility was completed, once again the majority did not fall within the mandate of the European Ombudsman (78.5%), either because the complaints were not made against a Community institution or body (93.7%) or because they did not involve maladministration (5.4%). Of the 21.5% of cases which did fall within the Ombudsman's remit, 449 of the 838 complaints were formally declared admissible, of which 258 led to an inquiry. In 2006, the Ombudsman carried out 582 enquiries in total; of which 315 were already underway in 2005 and 9 were launched on the Ombudsman's own initiative.

As in previous years, the institutional body which was the subject of most enquiries was the Commission, which accounted for 66% of enquiries (387); the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) accounted for 13% (74) the European Parliament for 8% (49) and the Council of the European Union for 2% (11). The predominant type of maladministration alleged was lack of transparency, including refusal of information (25%) followed by unfairness or abuse of power (19%) and a variety of other types of maladministration, culminating in the least-frequently alleged categories of legal error (5%) and failure to ensure fulfilment of Treaty obligations by the Commission (4%).