The 10th I.O.I.World Conference, to be held in Wellington, New Zealand from 13 to 16 November 2012, will provide Ombudsmen from around the world with the opportunity to meet, share their experience and engage in fruitful debate and discussion. The conference website has been recently launched.

The Gibraltar Chronicle covered the recent SYT training that took place at the I.O.I. General Secretariat in Vienna in June 2011 and that was attended by an expert from the Gibraltar Ombudsman's office. The article specifically points out the diversity of institutions represented in the course that provided the opportunity for views and practices to be discussed and new contacts to be made

The Public Defender of Rights (Ombudsman), as the Czech equality body, responses for researching in the area of discrimination and his first research was focused on employment (job offering). Ombudsman analyzed about 12,000 job advertising released on one of the portals in April and found out that every 6th advertisement was discriminatory.

The Ombudsman recently recommended that offences against the person and discriminatory acts where homophobia is the main motivation be criminalised. He underscores that in most EU Member States' legislations, homophobia is an aggravating circumstance or a constituent element of the offence.

The Korean I.O.I. member ACRC recently received an UN award for "Advancing Knowledge Management in Government" for its "e-People" tool. This integrated online portal deals with civil complaints and proposals regarding central and local governments and public organizations. The average number of daily visitors is about 100,000.

I.O.I. representatives have reacted to the tragic events in Norway expressing their solidarity. In communications to the Norwegian Ombudsman and member of the European I.O.I. Board Arne Fliflet I.O.I. President Beverley Wakem, I.O.I. Secretary General Dr. Peter Kostelka and Regional-Vice-President Rafael Ribó expressed on behalf of the entire ombudsman community  their deep sympathy.

Enthrusted with the National Preventive Mechanism against Torture (NPM), the Spanisch national Ombudsman Institution – the Public Defender – has conducted 231 inspection visits of places of deprivation of liberty during its first working year. The Office of the Public Defender headed by María Luisa Cava de Llano has accordingly published a first MNP Report.

During the presentation of his recent report entitled 'Contributions to a National Policy on intercultural bilingual education for the benefit of Peru's Indigenous Peoples' Ombudsman Eduardo Vega Luna affirmed: "Indigenous children and adolescents, in the Amazon as well as in the Andean region, are not receiving high-quality intercultural bilingual education, which constitutes a serious flaw in our country's educational system."