Page 202 - kdk-sempozyum-3

Insuring pluralism in particular with regard to ethnic minorities is
evident not only in the composition of the staff but also by establishing
the council of ombudsman which comprises of eight people, two of
them represent academia, two represent civil society more specifically
none governmental organizations, two are journalists, member of
journalists association and two of them belong to ethnic minorities.
And of course, we have to establish really good cooperation with
different especially local and regional NGOs that really help in insuring
pluralism.
Advocating for amending the legislation to include encouraging
ratification of a session is one recommendation that we have received
in 2013 and we have submitted a proposal to change the legislation
in that regard to the parliament earlier this year. And we’ll see how
that evolves hopefully it would be included in the legislation before the
next reaccreditation takes place.
To have sufficient budget was very important according to the
recommendation we received from the ICC because it really allowed
us to then very strongly negotiate for the increasing of budget to
take place. So, the fact that this was part of the recommendations
was included in all of my memos and documents, letters and e-mails
advocating for the increasing budget. As you can see on the slide it had
its ups and downs over the years but finally, we have received a certain
increase, I would not say substantive increase in budget because it is
still very small. But it has allowed us this year to employ additional
staff which will really enable us to work better on all the issues that
we have in front of us. So, the overall budget for this year is 1.3 million
Euros. I am sure it is very small compared to some of your offices but
in Croatia we have only 4 million people. I am not sure if that is any
relevance in counting the ratios but I will continue to advocate for even
larger budget of course.
Promotion of human rights is one of the most important mandate and
one that really differs at least from the experience of my office which
made a huge difference between the offices that we were, before we
were NHRI and the office that we are now. So what does promotion
of human rights mean? Raising public awareness on human rights
issues, we do that through round tables, different meetings, meetings
with different stake holders, media presence, insuring the visibility and

rd
200 | 3 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON OMBUDSMAN INSTITUTIONS