BackThe Northern Ireland Ombudsman and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) entered into a Service Level Agreement in October 2012 for the purposes of a joint project to develop human rights based approach to ombudsmen investigations. The Project Manager was a member of NIHRC staff who worked in the Ombudsman’s office and trained all staff and the Ombudsman’s Senior Management team in human rights principles and jurisprudence. A steering group was established to quality assure the joint project, comprising senior staff from both offices. The IOI has assisted the Ombudsman by providing an element of funding for the joint project and has encouraged and supported the project at all stages.
Working closely with the staff using actual case studies, the Project Manager contributed to the development of the Ombudsman’s position statement on the Human Rights based approach (available on request from the Northern Ireland Ombudsman). In July 2014 the Ombudsman and NIHRC produced the Human Rights Manual which is a toolkit for ombudsman staff to identify human rights issues in the assessment and investigation of complaints of maladministration. The manual is available to all staff and contains information with hyperlinks to relevant jurisprudence and legal instruments as well as practical tools to enable staff to work through the issues in a particular case. In September 2014 the Northern Ireland Ombudsman launched the Human Rights Manual at the IOI World Conference in Tallin.
The NIHRC and Northern Ireland Ombudsman’s office are committed to delivering a joint training package to enable ombudsman schemes to develop a human rights based approach to investigations of maladministration. In order to maximise the use of the available resources, the offices have agreed to provide the package using a ‘train the trainers approach ‘. The offices will undertake training for a number of ombudsmen schemes to be delivered between January and March 2015 and these will be delivered in-house. The Chief Commissioner of the NIHRC, Mr Les Allamby, and the Northern Ireland Ombudsman, Dr Tom Frawley, will jointly host an international conference on Human Rights and Ombudsmen in Belfast next year to further disseminate the learning from the project more widely.
