Journal of Political Sciences & Public Affairs
Open Access

Abstract

Challenges and Roles of Ombudsman Institution in Protecting Human Right: A Case Study of Addis Ababa City

Kalayu Equar*

The objective of this study is to explore the challenges and roles of ombudsman institution in protecting human rights in the case of Addis Ababa City. To this end, the researcher employed a qualitative research methodology, and used different techniques to collect the required data such as focus group discussions, in-depth interview and informants were selected trough purposive, convincing, snowballing samplings taken to enrich the empirical data from the institution. On top of this, the secondary data were also collected from various scholarly articles, journals, conference and symposium proceedings and institutional documents related to human rights protection, frameworks on and practices of ombudsman. The findings of the study indicated that, though, Addis Ababa city ombudsman institution striving to contribute on protection human rights via building democracy, improving service delivery and promoting good governance, however due to insufficient (unskilled) human resource, weak collaboration with national/international institutions, weak commitment of public officials, lack of operational/institutional autonomy, scrawny public awareness, legislation and recommendations problems and mandate overlap with other institutions are the daunting constraints which affect the institution not to perform its national mandate as it was hoped to do. Irrespective of the challenges, the research further pinpointed opportunities improvement of good governance, increment of legal provision to nationally protect human rights, policy reforms and improvement of public services delivery in many institutions and progressive democratization process being made the government could be using as positive grounds for institutional operation and to realize its mission. Thus, the study finally forwarded the institution of ombudsman needs to change a critical methodology to adopt human-rights based approach to work its mandates in protecting arbitrary violations of rights and also human rights institutions and ombudsman could potentially merge a move that could cut costs significantly due to scarcity of resource and bureaucratic overlap in many national jurisdiction of the country.

Published Date: 2021-09-15;