I can see from web searches that there are a lot of ombudsman agencies in Germany. But they are mostly private sector. I cannot find the national ombudsman that handles cases of a problem with a federal public service. Does that exist?
That’s a federalist and bureaucracy issue: depending on what issue exactly and issue it depends.
Dor example anything related to data protection even if the state the Datenschutzbeauftragte des Landes (Date protection delegate of the country/district) is the right person.
If you have something that needs escalation with the AGA then the only way I’m aware of is a form that you can send to a central complaints point.
In general the answer is “no” though sadly. The usual way is “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” from personal experience.
Yeah I’m not surprised there are subject matter-specific ombuds offices. I was hoping for one at the top of the tree for when those fail. I just found this page where the EU lists them for each member state:
https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/european-network-of-ombudsmen/members/all-members
And for Germany, this office is given:
https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html
The complexity in the description on the EU’s page indeed gives cause for concern.
when those fail.
That’s the entire point of the whole system. Complainants can fool themselves into thinking something is done about it, but nothing happens. If you are wronged by a public service, and aren’t particularly well connected to a superior of them, the only chance of forcing them to set things right is threatening them with, or actually taking them to court.
The petitions are again something else. As another user said: when the federalistic complaints don’t succeed it’s legal time. Even different government bodies sue each other regularly.
And it’s not as terrible as it sounds: a complaint is highly subjective and in Germany the system tries to push decisions very fast to “correct” or “incorrect”, removing the subjectivity of right or wrong.
Now what our legal and formal system have defined as “correct” I full heartily disagree with regularly. The intention to remove subjective evaluation I welcome though for formal bodies. That removes the leeway to have informal discrimination. And formal discrimination becomes at least transparent right away…
The petitions are again something else.
I was indeed alienated by the mention of petitions because in English it usually means asking lawmakers to change policy. I wondered if it meant something different in Germany. And if it means the same thing, it’s apparently wrong for the EU to list that agency as an ombudsman.
I am normally happy to use courts. But I don’t live in Germany, don’t speak German, and financing a lawyer would be a non-starter. I suppose I could try to find a German NGO who would support my case.
As this thread is quite old you won’t get a lot of additional engagement I’m afraid. What you can do is outline your situation and ask the natives how they would proceed. There are a lot of ways to … Live in this system without following the intent of the rules :)