THE Social Welfare Office has come under fire after it was revealed that a divorcee’s application was left untouched for over a year, despite the presence for months of all the necessary information.
Ombudswoman Iliana Nicolaou investigated the complaint against the Social Welfare Office and revealed the negligence of the case.
Specifically, Mrs Ch. M., who is the mother of an under-aged child, found herself in a difficult financial situation after her divorce and did not manage to deal with the necessities that arose. As her only way out she decided to address the Welfare Office and to apply for financial assistance.
The application at the Welfare Office in Nicosia was made in June 2006 and was only approved in July 2007, despite the fact that all necessary information and documents had been duly filed.
The Ombudswoman’s investigation revealed that it took the Welfare Office six months to realise that all necessary information had already been filed long ago by the applicant. It took the Office another four months to verify something it already knew, that the applicant had a Cypriot identity since she was born in Greece from a Cypriot mother. Another three months were spent waiting, in spite of the intervention of the Ombudswoman.
In total, it took one year and one month to approve the application of what should have been an open and shut case.
In her report, Nicolaou noted that the District Welfare Office “seems to have completely disregarded the particular circumstances of the case. It specifically disregarded the fact that the applicant was a low-paid, single parent with an under-age child, without any substantial support from her relatives and without shelter as, during the time of submission of the application for public support, her husband threw her out of the house”.
Nicolaou further reported that instead of examining the essence of the problem, the Welfare officials were seeking answers to Ch. M’s ethnic origins. Their approach therefore was that in order to classify the aforementioned applicant as a beneficiary of public support, it was necessary first to determine her Cypriot nationality. The Ombudswoman continued that even if the officials had doubts as to whether the applicant was a Cypriot, they should have considered the fact that her under-age child, who has a Cypriot father, has Cypriot nationality and as such has rights. They did not even consider the case of approval as a foreigner, despite the fact that the law allows such a possibility.
The Ombudswoman stated in her report that she was seriously concerned by the “laxity of the Welfare Office in conjunction with its failure to practically and effectively recognise the specifics of that particular family, in light of the numerous problems faced by single-parent families, be that either of financial nature or of increased family obligations”.
Nicolaou continued that “the negligence of the Civil Servants to fulfil their duties with the necessary promptness that the law requires undoubtedly aggravated the applicant, in relation to the financial difficulties she was forced to confront but also in relation to the psychological disturbance she suffered over the delay for which she herself was not responsible”.
