3.3.2 Cooperating with National Stakeholders
3.3.2.1 Civil Society
The Paris Principles require NHRIs to assure pluralism: this includes not only internal governance (for example, ensuring diversity among commissioners and staff), but also mechanisms that “enable effective cooperation”. The Principles require NHRIs to maintain ties with other bodies active in the human rights area, particularly with NGOs that work in the promotion and protection of human rights.4
The requirements of maintaining ties and cooperation should be made clear and NHRIs should be encouraged and supported in meeting these responsibilities.
3.3.2.2 Other Institutions
The Paris Principles state that NHRIs should consult with other bodies responsible for human rights protection and promotion. This may include “classic” ombudsman offices dealing with citizen’s complaints about State, special mediators, other institutions,5 and government departments that are responsible for women or children, for example.
This may not always be easy. Indeed, the proliferation of such bodies – children’s ombudsman offices, gender commissions, anti-corruption bodies, and so on that has occurred as States seek to address one issue or another can be bewildering. Difficulties may arise if there is overlapping jurisdiction between the NHRI and other independent institutions, including specialized bodies such as gender equality commissions, ombudsman offices and the like.
Nonetheless, the existence of other institutions also provides real opportunities to deal comprehensively with complex problems with multiple actors. NHRIs can address complex, systemic issues that other bodies cannot or will not address, while encouraging other institutions to take a human rights-based approach to their mandates. Organisations can, for example, work together on specialised issues, with each examining and addressing matters for which they have the main responsibility. For example, an NHRI and a specialised women’s commission or ombudsman could cooperate with parliamentary human rights groups, as well as government departments with expertise in the area, to deal with certain broad-based women’s issues.
Ombudsman institutions and their relationship to NHRIs is an area of particular interest. The traditional ombudsman model, as it evolved in Sweden, was not concerned directly with human rights. As noted elsewhere in this Toolkit, there are more recent institutional models that do have specific human rights protection mandates and these bodies, together with human rights commissions, are important interlocutors as NHRIs. According to statement by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in June 2009:
OHCHR also recognizes the important contribution that ombudsman institutions can make as another element in the national human rights protection system – even without an explicit mandate of human rights protection – given their role in ensuring government accountability and strengthening the rule of law. Many human rights abuses are indeed connected with maladministration, administrative malfeasance, or a lack of government accountability. The essential notion of procedural fairness, which underpins the administrative law that ombudsman institutions are mandated to uphold, is thus key to protecting the rights of individuals in their interactions with public authorities.6
The long term objective, from a NHRI and human rights perspective, is to avoid the creation of separate networks of institutions, to work with the Paris Principles, and to seek to expand the mandates of existing or planned ombudsman institutions to include human rights as much as possible. There are concrete examples of this,
for example the emergence of A status Ombudsman institutions in Spain, the Russian Federation, El Salvador, and Ecuador.
Another area where NHRIs should work in close cooperation with other stakeholders is the administration of justice. An important tool in this area is the Nairobi Declaration on the Administration of Justice, which elaborates upon the important role that NHRIs play in ensuring an effective administration of justice, in particular with regard to access to justice, the judiciary, law enforcement and correctional and detention facilities.
5 Paris Principles, Methods of Operation (f).
6 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, H.E. Ms. Navanethem Pillay to the 9th International Ombudsman Institute World Conference http://www.unhchr.ch/Huricane/Huricane.nsf/8a3876f1347c106a8025661000328ac0/1d4
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