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foundation for the institution. The human rights center is a very new
set up only three and a half years. We’ve started operation in 2012.
I am the first director and it still working progress obviously we are
still seeing what are the best ways of working and also because the
resources were smaller than in the original proposals. We have had
to priorities very tightly what we do and also work in sequence, so we
do something and hope to start something that would continue and
then we take slightly different activities to make sure that we in the
end on all the tasks that we have from the law. So we are functionally
independent so the ombudsman cannot tell us what we do but we
are administratively connected which means that we are in the same
offices, I mean the management group of the ombudsman mainly for
administrative issues. But we have our own separate budget although
we submit them together to the parliament structures. The Finnish
National Human Rights Institution has overall some 6 million Euros.
But the lion share of that money is with the ombudsman only about
10% with the human rights center and I think first small problem that
I would see is that the balance is perhaps is not exactly right. But we
have been getting a little bit more resources and we have an agreement
with the ombudsman that we can task each other’s expert of course
with agreement so that we can use some of their expertise and they
can also ask from us what to do. So we have tried to maximize the
synergies anticipating that we would not be able to get many more
resources in this very difficult financial times.
I already mentioned that we have a human rights delegation I will
come to that in a moment, it is our pluralistic body. The ombuds
office was certainly not pluralistic it is a bunch of Finnish lawyers so
we absolutely needed to make sure that we have a better portrayal
of the society connected to the office, it is also coordinating body. The
human rights center doesn’t deal at all with complaints. So we only
do promotion and general monitoring and that is a blessing because
the complaints are the hard work. The ombudsman takes about 5,000
complaints per year and they do more than 100 inspection visits every
year and that is an increasing trend with a new task. So, they have
also added their outreach although it is still very much visiting other
authorities or inspecting institutions or prisons. So, we have a human
rights delegation, the director is the chair of the delegation. We set the
agenda but we have hearings I have to admit that this has not been

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