Britain does not have its own detailed Declaration of Rights (the Bill
of Rights is a more limited document than its name might suggest),
but it is a signatory to both the UN and European Declarations on
Human Rights. The European document does have a commission and
court to interpret it. It may be significant that the British government
has been the subject of more actions than any other signatory (perhaps
because of the relative lack of legal remedies within the UK until the
1998 Human Rights Act gave power to British courts to draw
attention to such breaches). As a conventional international organ-
isation, however, the European Court on Human Rights (which is not
a part of the EU machinery) cannot enforce its judgements in Britain
but must rely upon shaming the British government and legislature
into action if it finds against UK authorities.
One Scandinavian institution which has been adopted in Britain
to help defend individual rights against administrative error or
invasion is a parliamentary Commissioner for Administration
(the ‘Ombudsman’) who can independently investigate actions by
government departments in cases of apparent ‘maladministration’.
(Similar ombudsmen have since been introduced in Britain for the
health service, local government, banking, insurance and building
societies.) This innovation was originally opposed as a breach of
British parliamentary traditions but this objection was overcome by
having the Ombudsman report to a parliamentary select committee.
The major limitations on the British parliamentary ombudsmen
are that their jurisdiction is limited to errors of administration
by a department for which a minister is responsible and that the
ombudsmen can only recommend remedial action to that Minister.
An ‘unfair’ piece of delegated legislation would be outside of the
ombudsmen’s jurisdiction. In Sweden, where the ombudsman origi-
nated, he or she has much stronger powers to insist on remedies and
operates within a tradition of open government in which all govern-
ment documents are open to inspection.
In much of continental Europe the tradition, stretching back to
administrative reforms introduced by Napoleon, is for there to be a
separate set of administrative courts. Whilst these were, no doubt,
intended originally to be more sympathetic to the executive than
ordinary local courts, they have now developed a sturdy judicial inde-
pendence combined with considerable administrative expertise. In
France, for instance, top graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Admini-184 DEMOCRACY