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its mandates in the media whether it is printed, electronic TV, social
media nowadays of course.
Outreach was mentioned several times it also takes a lot of staff skills
but I can say that today one of my staff members is at the crossing
border between Serbia and Croatia as the refugees started to go
through Croatia on their way to western Europe. We have two advisors
in the centers for asylum seekers as from the border they will be
transported to those centers and provided shelter and the necessary
aid so we have people there. We have also national preventive
mechanism today visiting one of the prisons in Croatia and making
sure that it is according to international standards. So, it does take
also a lot of efforts and a lot of funds and skills but we try to be among
the people as much as possible. Of course, it poses great challenges
and staff skills does not only mean that we had to hire a new staff of
course we had to hire new staff skilled in promotion and activities but
it also meant that many of the previous advisor were kind of resistant
towards new methods work so they had to be reassured in the new
ways of thinking and working so that we are more open to the public.
It is of course very much time demanding. It makes us vulnerable
we have to be very transparent, we have to keep up with the highest
standards of course that brings certain risks and challenges but still
the question remains is how do we reach the most vulnerable those 3 rd INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON OMBUDSMAN INSTITUTIONS
that are far away from regional offices or live in remote villages and
how even to approach them and see what their problems are, what
their position is and do they even know what rights do they have.
So, maybe just to come to an end, being ombudsman that is the NHRI
at the same time really poses a lot of challenges and very often it
feels like being an octopus and trying to handle so many different
situations and challenges at the same time. It is difficult to reconcile
traditional maladministration case handling with the human rights
based approach. We did ask several questions in the office amongst
ourselves. Does that mean that we investigate individual cases if there
have been violations in front of just public authorities or also private
entities? We decided not to investigate in accepting the discrimination,
when it comes to discrimination that we have authority also to work
with private sector. But when it comes to other rights, human rights
violations we do not investigate when it comes to the private sector we

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