The Ombudsman carried out an initiative to look into how the European Commission intends to guarantee respect for human rights in the context of the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), notably given the absence of a prior human rights impact assessment and the potential implications on 'migration and mobility'.

The Ombudsman subsequently transformed the initiative into an own-initiative inquiry and set out a further series of questions to the Commission about how it intends to monitor the human rights impact of actions under the MoU and what measures it has foreseen, including with regard to the possible suspension of EU funding, if human rights violations are identified.