The Ombudsman and Individual Rights

Abstract

WHEN Ronald Dworkin asks of the USA in his recent book, ‘Is democracy possible here?’, we should not take his question as irrelevant this side of the Atlantic. The Human Rights Act and the programme of constitutional reform of which it was intended to be a part remain consistent with the new project announced by the appearance of The Governance of Britain; and as we know, the reinvigoration of democracy is the express ambition of that new project. Quite what sort of democracy is at stake is rather more difficult to say. Dworkin talks of ‘partnership democracy’, in a style that is reminiscent of the language of those who see some sort of ‘deliberative democracy’ as the way forward, a compromise between the remoteness of the purely representative form of democracy to which we are accustomed and the elusive immediacy of a more direct form of democratic mandate. The future of democracy in that sense is implicated with the future of administrative justice. Partnership, or dialogue, between state and citizen is very much about the public space in which administrative decisions occur and it is the quality of those decisions—the extent to which they are reasoned, transparent and humane in texture—that will convince, or fail to convince, citizens that the state is serious about its rhetoric of dignity, human rights and personalised service.