Asian Interest In Ombudsman

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 14

Asian Interest In Ombudsman

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, February 22.

South-east Asian and Pacific members of the International Commission of Jurists, meeting last week in Bangkok, showed considerable interest in New Zealand’s office of Ombudsman, Sir Guy Powles said today on his return from the conference.

The conference urged nations in the region to examine the possibility of adopting the ombudsman concept as a means of facilitating the correction of administrative errors and minimising the possibility of bad administration.

It was also decided that lawyers in the region should ask their Governments to support the establishment of the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, with a status analogous to that of the U.NHigh Commissioner for Refugees. The conference considered that, given peace and stability in South-east Asia, no intrinsic factors in the region made the ultimate establishment, maintenance and promotion of the rule of law incapable of attainment. Such a rule could only reach its highest, most expressive and fullest realisation under a representative government freely chosen by universal adult sufferage. Sir Guy Powles said countries interested in having an ombudsman would have carefully to modify the scheme. As known in New Zealand the office could only work in countries that had already

reached a certain standard of administrative and governmental conduct.

However, to those at the conference it seemed to offer some avenue of approach for the common citizen to the hitherto closed bureaurocracies.