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Publishers Abstract:
The European Ombudsman has been in function since 1995. His office now offers 456 million Europeans in 25 Member States the opportunity to address themselves to the Ombudsman in 21 Treaty languages. This paper analyses the Ombudsman institution from a constitutionalist perspective. It explores the significance of the European Ombudsman institution for a functioning European constitution. To prepare the ground, section 2 gives a very short survey of the history, the mandate, the types of activities and the workload of the European Ombudsman. Section 3 discusses the Ombudsman's role as a constitution-maker and his proposals in the Constitutional Convention. In section 4 the focus is on the Ombudsman's functions within the European institutional balance. Section 5 analyses his contribution to the concretisation and implementation of basic constitutional principles (democracy, rule of law, and fundamental rights).
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