22 Annual report 2011 ­ mbudsman chooses to consider as part of his monitoring activities are not to O be notified. The Ombudsman’s task is general monitoring of the deportation area. However, pursuant to the general provisions of the Ombudsman Act, the ­Ombudsman may accept concrete complaints and open cases on his own ­initiative, cf. sections 13 and 17 of the Ombudsman Act. In such cases, the general principle of section 14 of the Ombudsman applies. According to this ­provision, the Ombudsman cannot consider complaints which can be brought before ­another administrative authority until the latter has made a decision. The Ombudsman submits an annual report on his monitoring activities to ­Parliament. In the period April 2011 to December 2011, the Ombudsman participated in four observed and four accompanied deportations. The observed ­deportations were to Serbia, Lebanon, the Ivory Coast and India. The accompanied d ­ eportations were to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Afghanistan and ­Lebanon. Altogether, the Ombudsman monitored 13 deportation cases ­involving 17 people. Based on his participation in an accompanied deportation to Afghanistan, the Ombudsman raised two questions. One related to police practice in cases where implementation of a deportation leads to families being split up. In response, the police sent an explanation of its general considerations in relation to the splitting up of families and police procedure in cases where one or more ­family members are not present when the police come to collect them. The second question related to police practice in connection with deportations to Afghanistan, which involved passing the foreigners over to private security guards in Frankfurt who had been hired by the Afghan airline. The police replied that the route to Afghanistan via Frankfurt was no longer used and that foreigners were therefore no longer passed over to private security guards. The Ombudsman took note of the police replies, which did not afford grounds for expressing criticism. In December 2011, the Ombudsman received, for the first time, copies of the police’s closed deportation cases in 2011 for review. There were 277 cases in total. They included 235 observed deportation cases, 41 accompanied deportation cases and a case concerning a person assumed to have left the country. Ten per cent of the cases were randomly selected for review in relation to the following issues: use of force, deportation of families, deportation of vulnerable groups (such as children, including unaccompanied children, single women, elderly people, people with disabilities and people with poor health), prior contact ­between the police and the foreigners, the police’s security assessments and the police deportation reports.