Bilal Mohammad Kabbout Cleaner Copenhagen City Hall 10 CASE NO. 17/00766 CASE NO. 17/00148 Bikers and gang members are usually not permitted leave from Prison and Probation Service institutions or released on parole if there is a violent conflict in the biker or gang member community. A practising lawyer wrote to the Ombudsman and asked as a gen­ eral question if it was legal for the Prison and Probation Service to base its decisions towards gang members etc. on the police’s assessment of whether there was a violent conflict in the biker or gang member community. Degenerative joint disease of the knee meant that a journeyman painter had to go on sick leave. After some time, the municipality assessed that his sick­ ness benefit could not be extended: there was no in­ formation about a definite prognosis of whether the journeyman painter would be able to resume work within the time frame laid down by the law – even though he had been offered to have knee surgery. He therefore had to go on cash benefit. The National Social Appeals Board agreed with the municipality’s decision. The Ombudsman could not consider the lawyer’s gen­ eral question since the Ombudsman does not give general legal statements as such unless related to a case which he is processing. Therefore, he asked the lawyer to contact him again if some of his clients wished to file complaints about specific decisions. The Ombudsman receives complaints from inmates in Prison and Probation Service institutions on a regular basis: complaints about actual decisions which inmates have received as well as complaints about more everyday conditions in institutions, for example the range of goods at the grocery, visiting hours, waiting times in connection with cell calls or the way prison officers speak to inmates. CASE NO. 17/02224 A man complained that neither the police nor SKAT (the Danish Customs and Tax Administration) would take any action towards a person driving a car with Swedish licence plates. The man was of the opinion that the person had a permanent address near his home (in Denmark) and that it was a case of syste­ matic fraud. The police had referred the man to SKAT, but the man had not had any response to his enquiries from SKAT. The Ombudsman sent the complaint to SKAT in order for it to be processed in accordance with SKAT’s in­ ternal procedures for processing of complaints about case processing. The Ombudsman cannot investigate complaints which can be considered by another authority. In practice, this also applies when an internal channel of complaint exists, meaning the possibility to have a complaint considered by the authority which the complaint concerns. ‘Excuse me, but I just need a new knee!’, the journey­ man painter wrote to the Ombudsman. He had main­ tained towards the municipality that the prognosis after knee surgery was good and that he would be able to resume work after two to three months of rehabilitation therapy. The Ombudsman sent the man’s complaint on to the National Social Appeals Board and asked if it might have had a bearing on the decision if the authorities had gathered more information about the surgery from the hospital. This led to the National Social Ap­ peals Board reopening the case and assessing that the municipality had not investigated the prognosis of the surgery sufficiently. Therefore, the municipali­ ty would have to look at the case again. A substantial proportion of the Ombudsman’s cases are about social security law and labour market law – in 2017, this applied in approximately one third of the concluded cases.