Ombudsman Kräuter welcomes student group from the Netherlands

As part of a series of visits planned by the European Law Students‘ Association (ELSA), a group of 30 law students from the University of Leiden visited Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Aside from the United Nations, the students were also highly interested to take the opportunity of their stay in Vienna to get to know the Austrian Ombudsman Board (AOB) and Dr. Kräuter was delighted to welcome them at the AOB’s premises in Vienna.

After a short introduction into the history and the tasks and responsibilities of the AOB, Ombudsman Kräuter explained in more details the AOB’s new positioning as the “Human Rights House of the Republic” and its mandate to protect and promote human rights in Austria in its function as National Preventive Mechanism.

The presentation was followed by an active and vivid question-and-answer session in which the students showed great interest in the concept of ombudsmanship as control mechanism for public administration in general and the AOB’s preventive work in particular.

In his function as Secretary General of the International Ombudsman Institute (IOI), Ombudsman Kräuter also presented the IOI as independent, non-political and global organization for the cooperation of up to 160 independent ombudsman institutions from more than 90 countries worldwide and explained its main focus of acting as a network for the exchange of expertise and information between its members.