Umberto Di Primio, Ombudsman of the Abruzzo Region, has received 133 requests (from 26 February to 17 June) since he was elected by the Regional Council on 30 January, one in three from the province of L’Aquila.
Di Primio succeeded the late Giandonato Morra, who passed away in August last year. In the press conference, he outlined the balance sheet of the first phase of his mandate as well as the last of his predecessor: 2023 (the activity was interrupted with the death of Morra) saw the presentation of 420 requests, also in this case with clear prevalence of the provincial territory of L’Aquila: 46 percent of the total. The Ombudsman, established by regional law 126 of 1995, is an independent guarantee authority of the Regional Council. It assists citizens in relations with public administrations, in particular with regard to access to documents and civic access, but in general it also has the task of supervising the good performance of the PA. Di Primio defined it as “the autonomous regional institution of guarantee, dedicated to facilitating the relationship between citizens and the public administration with the aim of resolving, or at least attempting to resolve, the problems that may arise between them”.
From today’s words of Umberto Di Primio, Ombudsman of the Abruzzo Region, the approach of an office within the regional institution also emerged, which is also working to bring out a figure with prerogatives and skills among the citizens of undoubted usefulness, but which in many ways requires a communicative impulse as well as regulatory renewal. In fact, he said, his mandate includes training meetings in the area, organized with the collaboration of the University of Chieti and the ANCI, and a proposal to reform the 1995 founding legislation.
If the tasks are defined, in many cases flexibility and common sense are necessary: ”We have great responsibility because those who turn to us do so because they are not available to turn to the TAR. Many times we managed to resolve situations by avoiding unnecessary conflicts. Only a few weeks ago we unblocked the case of a municipality from which a citizen had been waiting for liquidation for 12 years, marked by at least two court cases”. The scope of this “parallel” activity can be understood by reading the total number of formal decisions adopted by the Ombudsman, which are included in the areas of access to documents and civic access: 24 in 2023 out of 420 requests, 16 so far in 2024 out of 133 instances. The rest ends up in nothing, it is often managed in another way, in the most varied fields: environment, health care, social assistance, right to education, education and culture, managers of public services, work and social security issues, public works and urban planning, public employment, administrative sanctions, Abruzzo earthquake, telecommunications and telephones, regional transport, taxes.
In many cases, the Ombudsman is seen by citizens as a third party to whom they can express complaints about certain attitudes of the public administration. In this sense, Di Primio outlined a path and powers that can go as far as requesting a commissioner ad acta from the President of the Region (when the citizen complains about the failure to adopt the necessary acts), but which has never been used, preferring also to effectiveness of activating communications with the bodies involved, and therefore effectively exercising the role of intermediation which is at the basis of the origins of the figure, which reach Sweden over two centuries ago, but with the first foundations already in the Roman Empire. Work in the healthcare field is frequent, with problems related to waiting lists: Di Primio said that on more than one occasion the office has underlined the illegitimacy of their closure with the local health authorities concerned.
