Cihat Bardak Secretary to the Minister for Fisheries and Equal Opportunities and the Minister for Nordic Cooperation Ministry of Foreign Affairs Copenhagen 130 CASE NO. 17/04038 CASE NO. 17/01486 ‘Since Monday I have been sitting in a solitary con­ finement cell for 23 hours a day.’ This is what an inmate said when he telephoned the Ombudsman of­ fice on a Wednesday. The inmate also stated that he did not know why he had been placed in isolation or for how long he was to be in isolation. A prison offi­cer had told him that he would get the decision in writing, but that had not happened yet. Two care assistants on night duty at a nursing home were called in for a meeting because witnesses alleged that the care assistants had been sleeping while on duty. The care assistants disagreed: they had only been relaxing under a blanket. They did not under­ stand how anybody could have seen them sleep­ ing as they had been sitting with the curtains drawn and the door closed. In the municipality’s opinion, the care assistants should have taken turns to relax, no matter what the circumstances. The care assistants were therefore issued with a warning for having caused uncertainty as to whether they were awake and alert. A staff member from the Ombudsman office tele­ phoned the prison management and was informed of the basis for the placement in a solitary confinement cell. The management would make sure that the in­ mate received the decision in writing. At times, information given over the telephone by a citizen causes one of the Ombudsman’s staff members to telephone the authority involved to learn more about the case – for instance if the citizen is pre­ cluded from or has difficulty in telephoning the au­ thor­ity personally or if the matter is particularly intrusive. CASE NO. 17/00652 SKAT (the Danish Customs and Tax Administration) refused a man’s request for access to files in his own tax case. When the man appealed to the Tax Appeals Agency, he was told that it would take two years to process the appeal. The statement about the long case processing time caused the Ombudsman to start a general investi­ gation of the Tax Appeals Agency’s case processing times in this type of cases, meaning appeals against refusals to grant access to files for persons who are parties to the case in question. In the Ombudsman’s assessment, the average case processing time, which in 2016 was around five months, was unacceptable. While the Ombudsman was processing the case, the Tax Appeals Agency decided to establish, as quickly as possible, a new division with the task of processing appeals against refusals to grant access to files for persons who are parties to the case in question. The Ombudsman may take up matters on his own ini­ tiative and carry out major investigations. Please see www.ombudsmanden.dk for a list (in Danish) of socalled own-initiative investigations within the field of taxation. The Ombudsman did not find that he could criticise the municipality’s warning. He pointed out that the Ombudsman is not normally able to interrogate wit­ nesses, and that for the same reason he was unable to shed light on the disagreement as to what had happened during the night watch. The Ombudsman regularly receives complaints from public employees about their employment conditions. The complaints may, for instance, concern employment law sanctions or the right to be heard as a party to a case, the right to include a representative or the right to make public statements about conditions in the workplace.