73 Jens Olsen Head of Division, General Department The Ombudsman around the world In a humid, hot room in Hanoi, the Danish Ombudsman and some of his employees are at a conference with various representatives of the Vietnamese government, university world, media, etc. The conference is the last in a series which the Danish Embassy has funded and organised with the Danish Ombudsman institution and the Vietnamese Parliament. The purpose of the collaboration project is to assist the Vietnamese government in investigating the possibilities of enhancing the effectiveness of the national assembly’s appeal system, and in this connection also to investigate together the possibilities of establishing an ombudsman office. After some days of presentations, questions and explanations about the ombudsman concept and its migration from Sweden via Denmark across the world, an older, evidently respected and wise woman takes the floor. It is the former Minister for Social Affairs, who wants to present her assessment of whether an ombudsman in Vietnam is at all realistic. Her words are abrupt, but very precise in the translation into English: ‘In this country, we think in terms of the community; we protect the community and groups within the community and are not focused on the individual in the same way as you are. Moreover, an ombudsman is an individual, and giving so much power and influence to one person is foreign to us.’ Fifty years earlier, another Danish ombudsman, Stephan Hurwitz, was also invited to a conference, this time in Kandy, Sri Lanka. The conference was organised by the UN, and Stephan Hurwitz’s presentation was entitled ‘The Scandinavian Ombudsman’. The audience included Attorney-General Dr John Robson from New Zealand. In April 1960, his report on the ideas in Hurwitz’s presentation and the Danish ombudsman model was included in the political manifesto for administrative reforms of the National Party, which later formed a government, and subsequently it became reality. The New Zealand Ombuds­ man office was established in 1962 – the first of its kind in the English-speaking world – and from there the inspiration to establish ombudsman offices spread to other countries within the British Empire.