Ex-Portuguese Justice Minister Anjinho elected EU ombudsman

Portugal’s Teresa Anjinho was on Tuesday elected EU ombudsman, after fending off competition from five other rivals to gain support from members of the European Parliament (MEPs).

She’ll succeed Emily O’Reilly, the Irishwoman who has for over a decade been responsible for probing maladministration in EU bodies such as the European Commission.

At a 3 December hearing with MEPs, Anjinho pledged to “ensure that our EU administration adheres to the highest standards of transparency, ethics and upholds the rights of European citizens.”

The principles of “fairness, integrity and trust …  are crucial to strengthen the bond between institutions and their citizens,” she added. 

The second and final round of voting on Tuesday saw Anjinho gain an absolute majority of 344 MEPs, avoiding the need for a third round run-off with the second-place candidate.

In second place came Dutch ombudsman Reinier van Zutphen, followed by Estonian supreme court judge Julia Laffranque.  

The votes are secret, but Anjinho is understood to have gained support from the centre-right European People’s Party, the largest grouping in the European Parliament, to which she was previously affiliated as a national lawmaker and briefly, in 2015, as justice minister. 

But she also sought to reassure lawmakers of her “independence and impartiality,” citing her background in academia and as Portuguese deputy ombudsman. She was perhaps aware that strong political ties could prove a liability for a supposedly apolitical role, in which she might have to investigate party colleagues such as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Her initial nomination in September saw her backed by all but one of Portugal’s 21 MEPs, suggesting an ability to reach across the floor.

The ombudsman’s work predominantly concerns responding to complaints — from Europeans who’ve found themselves at the sharp end of EU bureaucracy, or from journalists, activists or NGOs seeking greater transparency from EU institutions.

O’Reilly, an ex-journalist who had previously been Ireland’s ombudsman, hasn’t been afraid to court controversy since taking office in 2013 — an approach that made her broadly popular in the European Parliament. 

Her high-profile cases include intervening on alleged talks on vaccine contracts between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the head of pharma company Pfizer, and probing the appointment of Germany’s Martin Selmayr to the post of Commission Secretary General, the most senior position in the EU executive’s ranks, from which he then stepped down.

But O’Reilly’s focus was not just on high politics, and has said that her favourite case was securing a parliamentary pass for a contractor’s baby, enabling her to continue work as an interpreter while breastfeeding.

Despite her training as a lawyer, Anjinho has pledged to keep that focus on the human, rather than legalistic, side of her work.

“Every complaint is an act of trust … people go to you sometimes with not even a notion of what the law says, just the unfairness of it,” she previously told Euronews, adding: “Not everything that is in the law is fair, and not everything that is fair is in the law.”