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The Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice and Institutional Change

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Ombudsman as a Global Institution

Part of the book series: Public Sector Organizations ((PSO))

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Abstract

This chapter tracks the recent institutional development of the Ombudsman in relation to the Chancellor of Justice. Over time, there has been an institutional differentiation between the two legal overseers, where the Ombudsman now focuses on individual rights and increasingly on social matters, while the Chancellor of Justice is more concerned with systemic issues, such as the oversight of the courts of law and providing legal advice to the government. But their mandates overlap, which has caused institutional tensions and attempts to renegotiate the division of tasks. Here the global models are a source of ideas but also of legitimation and a sense of orientation. Perceptions of the Ombudsman as a global institution were translated into Finnish institutional debates on the division of tasks between the Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice that had been ongoing for 100 years. History and global models were referenced in legitimizing and explaining institutional developments and interests.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In addition, both legal overseers have their regular customers—serial complainants—some of whom have tended to act based on media coverage of the institutions.

  2. 2.

    The impeachment was initiated and transferred to the Ombudsman by the Constitutional Law Committee of Parliament.

  3. 3.

    In relative terms the Chancellor of Justice transferred some 3% of its complaints to Ombudsman in 2017 whereas the Ombudsman did so in less than 0.7% of its cases. In 2016, the Ombudsman transferred 14 cases to the Chancellor of Justice (0.3%) and in return the Chancellor had transferred 65 cases to the Ombudsman (about 3%).

  4. 4.

    Owing to structural changes due to urbanization and Finns’ work-based emigration to Sweden also led to the rise of agrarian populist movement spearheaded by Finnish Rural Party (SMP) whose chairman Veikko Vennamo actively challenged the Chancellor of Justice (Seppinen 2009, 126–29).

  5. 5.

    The proposal by Member of Parliament Kristian Gestrin contained a reference to an international research article on the Finnish legal overseers by an American legal scholar who pointed out that they operated with most limited resources (Gellhorn 1966, 346; Seppinen 2009, 123–25), which was used as an argument supporting the new position of Deputy Ombudsman (founded in 1971).

  6. 6.

    The Ombudsman and Chancellor of Justice had also collaborated on the matter and had joint staff training related to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  7. 7.

    This was seen to have led to isolationism in some historical turning points where the Swedish model could have been promoted. For example, Jacob Söderman’s autobiography identifies the election of the first European Ombudsman as a case in point, as Söderman became elected largely with the help of Southern European countries where there were existing contacts from Söderman’s previous years as a Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman, while the Swedes failed to find a candidate and support (Saari 2014, 239–48).

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Correspondence to Tero Erkkilä .

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Erkkilä, T. (2020). The Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice and Institutional Change. In: Ombudsman as a Global Institution. Public Sector Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32675-3_4

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