Good morning everyone and it’s a great pleasure to be here at the launch of a most important publication concerning the office I have had the privilege to lead for the last eleven years.

I am immensely grateful for the work that so many people have put into it and its publication today is especially significant to me personally coming as it does just days before my successor will be elected by the European Parliament. I hope that it will serve as a very useful guide as they navigate their first steps in the role.

Thank you to Maastricht University for hosting this event and in particular the Globalisation and Law Network and the Maastricht Centre for European Law.

I thank the organisers Ellen Vos, Monica Claes, Mariolina Eliantonio and Sarah Tas, and the editors of this book- Deirdre Curtin, Anna Morandini, Sarah Tas and my own colleague Tanja Ehnert.

I thank all of the contributors who set aside time from their busy lives to reflect on the work of the Ombudsman and to present all of us with such fresh thoughts and ideas not just about the European Ombudsman but also about the state of EU public administration today in a complex and challenged environment.

I greatly appreciate the planning, the collaboration, the dedication, the sheer hard work that has gone into producing something that is important not just for the Office of the European Ombudsman but for the wider EU administration and indeed for EU citizens themselves.

I’ve now been an Ombudsman for over 21 years both at national and at EU level. Throughout that time I have used various ways to describe what a public service Ombudsman does. An Ombudsman I say ‘keeps the good guys good’ or, an Ombudsman ‘bridges the gap between citizen and state’ or. an Ombudsman ‘explains to the administration how their rules and regulations actually feel like to ordinary and often powerless people’.

But the description that resonates most is that an Ombudsman is a check on the abuse of power.

My understanding of the essence of the role is based partly on the Ombudsman origin story. Over 200 years ago, we are told, an exiled Swedish king sought to make sure that his citizens back home were not being abused by the bureaucrats he had left to look after them, and so he created this creature, this institution, whose precise role was to protect the people from the abuse of administrative power.

We tend to think of abuse as power as something that relates to very serious and very harmful acts yet, arguably, that description  fits virtually every single act of maladministration that my office deals with, from a failure to reply to a citizen communication, a failure to accommodate the needs of a person with disabilities in a recruitment procedure,  the improper withholding of a grant, a blind eye turned to a revolving door case, a wilful wilding of documents when the law is clear that they should be released, and weak oversight of fundamental rights breaches when political sensitivities are at play.

In every case the big administrative body is either holding power over the powerless, over the supplicant, or it is putting its internal needs over the needs of the citizens it is precisely there to serve.

Our role, as the European Ombudsman, has been to put a check on those abuses, constantly to remind the institutions that they are there to serve the public and not themselves and not the private interests of others be they individuals or large corporations.  

This book explores how we have done that, our methods, our reasonings, our successes, our struggles. Each one of the three Ombudsmen to date has taken a different approach to the role yet we have all marched in the same broad direction in attempting to level the playing field as between the power of the administration and the relative powerlessness of the citizen. 

We have lent our expertise and our status within the administrative architecture to those citizens to enable them to play with a reasonable hand.

The theme of my Office this year concerns the importance and the protection of an independent public service. That sounds like a rather abstract topic, perhaps nothing we need to concern ourselves with in the EU with its high administrative and rule of law standards

But we cannot be complacent. Recent history has shown us how quickly things can turn, how once high functioning courts, high functioning departments of state, high functioning oversight bodies, can be neutered, can be politicised, can be robbed of those elements essential to citizen wellbeing and to citizen trust.

Because when the state – through the manipulation and downgrading of its administration -withdraws its protection, when the state no longer serves the needs of all of its people, when private interests are empowered to carry out what should properly be the state’s role, not alone are people harmed, but the pain they consequently feel can be weaponised for political gain by bad actors.

The lurch to the right in recent years in many parts of the world and including Europe, to populism, to political and all kinds of polarisation is often traced back to the financial crisis that began almost 14 years ago. 

The state, according to this reasoning, whether in the US or in parts of Europe or elsewhere, allowed financial markets to operate with such limited regulation and that the greed unleashed by the absence of state oversight eventually, inevitably, resulted in devastation for countless millions of people. And that pain then turned into anger, into mistrust and at times into a state of mind that craves the rhetoric of political charlatans with the gift of transforming the base metal of their cynicism into political gold.

When preparing these words for today, I reflected on the aftermath on the recent killing in cold blood of a US health insurance executive by a 26 -year- old young man.

The story of that shocking event has become not just the story of the killing itself, but the arguably darker story of how so many Americans from every political affiliation from left to right have reacted to it.

Such is the anger of many American people at the exploitative behaviour of private health insurers, that some saw that young man as a hero, an avenging angel taking on the big corporations on behalf of the little guy. The young man’s life provides a much more complex picture but I imagine that many academics, particularly those with a specialisation in justice will be analysing this case for many years to come.

The New York Times this week led a conversation on the killing and the reaction to it with three of its columnists. Some parts of that conversation resonated with me in light of our reflections today on public administration even if, thankfully, the healthcare system in most parts of the EU is infinitely more humane and affordable than that which exists in the US.

Let me read out three quotes from the NYT conversation noting the effective absence of the state in the regulation of the private providers, the state effectively absenting itself from its most vital role – protecting its people from harm.

One commentator said “The question isn’t whether he should be a folk hero — it’s why, to some unquantifiable number of people, he indisputably is. Obviously, it speaks to the intense rage people feel toward these insurance companies, which I understand and share. But it’s also part of a broader societal embrace of vigilantism, which until now was mostly a right-wing phenomenon, and which derives from a collapse of faith in the institutions that are supposed to provide redress.”

Another said: “Dealing with health insurance companies when you are vulnerable — facing illness, pain and loss — and knowing that such a company is profiting off you is a visceral, enraging experience. Some people want to be rescued, even by an outlaw. A recent Senate report says UnitedHealthcare more than doubled the rate of denials for post-acute care for the elderly as it pressured the company’s human reviewers to strictly hew to the algorithmic recommendation system that it had introduced.

The sense that a cold, calculating, profit-making automaton can come at a person when they feel the most fragile, and without accountability and recourse, is the type of environment that can find people cheering on vigilantes.”

 While another commentator stated: “When you’re dealing with them, you’re constantly reminded that decisions about your health and well-being are being made without regard to your best interests — it is literally the opposite of being cared for. They exemplify the heartless precarity that underlies so much of American life.”

So that’s one example, even if extreme of what happens when the state and the administration absolves itself from protecting its people.  I fully understand the radical difference in political cultures between the EU and US, where in the latter, a survival of the fittest mentality remains a dominant feature of political and social life.

But some of those observations also have resonance here including the role of algorithms- largely unleashed from human control - in making literal life and death decisions

And substitute for example the desire to be rescued by an ‘outlaw’ with the desire to be rescued by an authoritarian populist. Consider the absence of accountability as a major cause of public frustration and anger. Consider the failure to regulate – effectively to favour the private interest over the public interest - as another one.

Those issues, those questions, albeit less dramatically for the moment, constantly appear in our caseload and this is why the work of an ombudsman and other soft power oversight institutions is so central to the task of keeping the administration focused on its primary duty and that is the protection of the people that it serves.

Because when it protects the people, it also protects the state, protects its institutions, protects its courts, protects the very systems that sustains vibrant and healthy democracies. And it protects through its independence, its culture of integrity, its fairness, its empathy and most of all, its ability to see the human at the heart of everything it does.

This book explores many key areas of our work, from access to documents, conflicts of interests, revolving doors, regulatory agency oversight, infringement cases, fundamental rights and many more. In general, and commendably, the EU administration strongly supports our work and accepts our recommendations and suggestions.

But when it doesn’t, when it refuses an access to document request for obviously political reasons, when it fails to have balanced representation in its expert groups advising on vital matters of public interest. when it allows an EU civil servant effectively to be bought by the sector it had previously regulated, when it fails to enforce fundamental right standards in its dealings with third countries, the gate is then opened to mistrust and a path cleared for the seductive charm of the cynic and the populist.

I have led this office in line not just with the statute, not just in line with the treaties and the charter of fundamental rights but also in line with a belief system informed by more than forty years of watching the interaction between a state and its people, both as journalist and Ombudsman.

 I have spoken before of watching people with disabilities chaining themselves to the gates of the parliament building in Dublin at the height of the financial crisis, pleading for their benefits to be returned to them even as our government insisted that little had changed.

 In 2013, following my election here, I witnessed people from countries worst hit by Troika enforced cutbacks coming to Brussels to find someone who could help them, someone who could make whoever had caused their pain accountable.

The redress they wanted was not even the return of their health, not the restoration of their businesses, not the retrieval of their homes. What they wanted more than anything was for someone to stand up and give an accounting to them of what had happened and why.

My time in Office has also been informed by what citizens also crave – an administration that hears them, human being to human being, a system that serves them and not itself, and an administration independent enough, strong enough and ethical enough to withstand the political winds that at times threaten to throw it off its path.

My successor is taking over in very challenging times as the EU seeks to deal with crises and potential crises on all fronts. In my time in office the Commission has changed from a simple Commission to what is now a self- styled, so-called geopolitical Commission with defence also at times added to that title.

I’m not entirely sure what the essence of that change is since there has been no Treaty change between the Barroso Commission and the Von der Leyen Commission. But what I do know is that incredibly important decisions have been made and will continue to be made and the task of the European Ombudsman and other bodies is to make sure that accountability keeps pace with the dizzying speed of the geopolitical changes we are witnessing and that we will all be subject to.

And I am not entirely confident that that accountability gap will be filled or that there is a political appetite to fill it. Access to documents is now more tightly controlled than ever with cases of supposed political sensitivity either delayed for an unconscionable length of time or else refused on highly dubious grounds. It is also clear to us that even ECJ clarifications on access rights are at times ignored. It will be very interesting to hear what the Court will have to say on the text message case involving the Commission President and the New York Times and whether it will have any impact on the highly controlled culture we now witness around access.

This publication provides an excellent critique of the office of the European Ombudsman and will be invaluable as a learning and reflection tool not just for our office but hopefully for the wider public administration. In general, the contributors give our work positive reviews while also pointing out areas in which we could do better and again I thank you all for that.

But, as I have said now on numerous occasions, an Ombudsman in many cases is only as effective as the administration allows us to be. There are wonderful Ombudsmen in countries with weak rule of law who struggle to get finely argued and legally sound recommendations accepted. Equally I have known mediocre Ombudsmen who have no trouble at all doing so because the administrative culture is such that acceptance is the default position.

In my view, and where there is a good, effective and independent Ombudsman, the quality of the administration it oversees can be measured by its response to the office and to its recommendations. Once that relationship starts to unravel, once recommendations are rejected for political or other internal reasons democracy itself begins to unravel, trust is lost and the field is left open, as I said earlier, for bad actors. It is never enough for political leaders to claim allegiance to democracy and the rule of law, they must demonstrate it in their conduct and in their actions every single day.

Thankfully the EU administration still cleaves closely to the values that underpin the union itself, but it and we must always be vigilant.

Our Office will I am sure continue to play that vigilant role and I thank you all for what you have done through your contributions to this publication to help to strengthen our resolve and our capacity.

I want to conclude by thanking also my fantastic colleagues in the office of the European Ombudsman who carry out our work with such passion and such skill and notably today, Tanja, Koen and Michau who have contributed to this publication.

But I would also like to single out – with immense thanks – the work of Professor Deirdre Curtin in this venture. She not alone masterminded the Florence Conference of two years ago which begat this book but also worked tirelessly to see it through to its completion and we owe her a great debt of gratitude.