Gastlezing van staatssecretaris Sandra Palmen - Schlangen bij de Universiteit Oslo
Gastlezing van staatssecretaris Sandra Palmen-Schlangen (Herstel Toeslagen) bij de juridische faculteit van de Universiteit van Oslo op 20 mei 2026. De uitgesproken tekst geldt.
Striking a balance between the letter and the spirit of the law
Godmorgen alle sammen.
Så hyggelig å være på besøk hos dere i dag.
Takk for invitasjonen.
My name is Sandra Palmen.
I am the Minister for Benefits Redress in the Netherlands.
But first and foremost I am a jurist.
And I must confess that I’m something of a nerd when it comes to the law.
And so, while preparing for this working visit, I immersed myself in Norway’s legal history. I was fascinated to learn that your Landslov
made you the first European country with uniform legislation applicable to the entire Kingdom.
And it’s especially nice to be visiting Norway in the week that you celebrate syttende mai, or Grunnlovsdag –Constitution Day.
To me, the law means refusing to look away.
Or, as my law professor, the former Dutch National Ombudsman Alex Brenninkmeijer, used to say:‘Make sure that every evening
you’re able to look at yourself in the mirror.’
To me, that’s what this lecture is about: being true to your legal values.
And since we’re on the subject of legal values,
this seems like a good time to mention my legal robes.
I’ve brought mine along with me today.
You see, they have a very special significance, which I’ll come back to later.
Right now I’m a jurist operating in the political sphere.
To be honest, a political career was never my ambition.
I had a great job as a legal adviser at the Dutch Tax Administration,
and I was a part-time judge at the Netherlands’ highest administrative court.
And I was still planning to get my PhD.
But my career took a turn when the law – and my sense of justice – intervened.
And I ended up becoming a minister in the Dutch government.
Of course, this wasn’t something that just happened overnight…
Let me quickly take you back in time, to 2017.
I had a job I loved at the Tax Administration.
And one day a director asked me to look at a file concerning Dutch childcare benefit.
After studying the file, it quickly became clear to me
that the government wasn’t treating people fairly.
Parents who had received a bit too much benefit for the full year were suddenly required to pay back the entire annual amount
in one go, halfway through the year.
The sums were often thousands of euros.
My main objection was that the decision to terminate benefit halfway through the year was based on incorrect legal grounds.
This meant that these parents were denied legal protection.
And it was clear that the government’s actions had landed those parents in real difficulties.
I was faced with a dilemma:
for me, the most logical step, legally speaking,
was to write to the parents, apologise for the error
and pay them a reasonable amount of compensation.
But the Tax Administration might not be happy about that.
It was a time when fraud and abuses were under a microscope.
And many politicians viewed benefit recipients with distrust.
A proposal to redress this mistake by paying compensation might not go down well in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government.
I had to carefully consider what I should write in my memo.
Should I say what my director wanted to hear in this political climate?
But I wasn’t a politician.
I was a jurist. And it was my job to apply the law.
So I decided to choose the law.
And, frankly, to choose me.
After all,
what kind of jurist would I be if I didn’t stand up for the law?
And although that memo remained in a drawer for a long time
– which happens a lot with highly complex cases –
that document unexpectedly became part of a process of irreversible change.
Because my memo eventually saw the light of day.
Thanks to two investigative journalists and several members of parliament who had received many reports that something wasn’t right with the childcare benefit system.
They kept on asking questions.
They weren’t satisfied with partial explanations.
And gradually, they built up a large case file.
When this was first made public, the political impact became clear:
Between 2005 and 2019, tens of thousands of parents who’d received too much childcare benefit were forced to pay it back.
Often, they had to pay thousands of euros.
Many people ended up in debt. Some lost their jobs and their homes. And some became ill.
In some cases, children were even removed from their families, because the stress and tensions had made the situation at home impossible.
The Netherlands was in shock.
What had gone wrong?
How could this have happened in a country known for its effective government?
How was it possible that we had so badly lost sight of the impact of government actions on ordinary people?
A Parliamentary Committee on Childcare Benefit was established, and I was called to testify.
The committee’s conclusion was clear.
The parents had suffered ‘unprecedented injustice’.
The government set up a major operation to redress that injustice.
In 2022, a minister was appointed to deal with the failings in the benefits system.
And when my predecessor stepped down in 2024,
I was asked to take up the post.
Duty called.
The redress operation is made up of three elements:
First:
arranging financial compensation
for the parents and children affected;
Second:
providing support with psychological and emotional recovery;
And lastly:
restoring public trust in government.
Because a great deal of damage was done.
We’ve now reached the final phase of that operation.
For most of the parents, the financial part has now been completed.
My focus is now mainly on those parents who deserve extra
compensation.
Because they lost their job or their home, for example.
Our aim is to fully complete the financial redress element by the end of 2027.
And at that point, specialist organisations will assume responsibility for the emotional and psychological support process.
When the time comes, I will be stepping down from my role as minister, and I won’t be replaced.
Because, if everything goes to plan, the parents will have received the redress and support they deserve for the injustice they suffered.
Which is where it all started for me, of course, almost 10 years ago.
For now, though, there’s still plenty of work to be done.
Perhaps the most fragile element of this is restoring trust.
Because this is about mutual trust…
in the sometimes-fraught relationship between government and people.
It’s also about the rule of law.
Because the rights of citizens were not sufficiently protected.
But above all, of course, it’s about how we treat each other.
Person to person, in our day-to-day interactions.
And it’s about justice.
Especially when it comes to the relationship between government and the people it serves.
When I testified before the Parliamentary Committee
I said that the people who implement policy
– those who are in direct contact with citizens –
know better than anyone what is going on.
They know what is working as it should.
But they also know what is going wrong.
They see how laws and rules work in practice.
They see the effects on people. And on people’s lives.
What happens at home, behind closed doors.
They are in contact with ordinary people.
And so it’s here that there are opportunities to be taken.
One of the lessons that we in the Netherlands have learned from the childcare benefit scandal is to make far better use of those opportunities.
This means that the people who make policy and those who implement it need to roll up their sleeves and work together.
Because policy that doesn’t work in practice is just bad policy.
That’s true, not only in the Netherlands, but everywhere.
If our checks and balances don’t work properly, ordinary people can get stuck in the system. With disastrous results.
In the Netherlands, it was the childcare benefit scandal.
In the UK, it was for example the Post Office Scandal.
In Australia it was the Robodebt scandal.
And here in Norway, you had the NAV scandal.
These are not isolated incidents.
They are the result of insufficient attention being paid to the legal protection of ordinary citizens.
If we want to avoid these kinds of scandals in the future,
we need to make our systems more human-centred.
Because there’s a big difference between implementing the letter of the law and applying the law fairly.
The law is necessary.
It offers predictability, legal certainty and equal treatment.
Without law there can be no order, no certainty and no trust.
And yet…
The law is also a snapshot.
It captures what the government considers reasonable at that moment.
In that sense, legislation is a set of standards frozen in time:
A fixed expression of moral choices.
And that is where the problem lies.
Because society changes so fast that the law can’t keep up.
The practical reality is often so complex that we can’t fully capture it in rules.
And people’s lives can’t be reduced to sections and subsections.
That’s why I say that implementing the letter of the law is not the same thing as applying the law fairly.
Applying the law fairly requires more of us.
It requires good judgment.
The ability to recognise when strict application of the rules will produce an outcome that, if we’re honest, we know to be unfair.
In short, it requires humanity.
Fortunately, we have the four cardinal virtues to guide us:
Prudence, justice, moderation and fortitude.
First:
Prudence – wisdom, essentially – requires us to look further than the letter of the law.
To think about the consequences of a decision in a specific case.
Second:
Justice – the very core of our legal system – requires us to treat people equally in equal circumstances.
When circumstances are not equal, it requires us to carefully assess the differences. And that calls for a nuanced approach.
Third:
Moderation reminds us that limits must be placed on power. Including the power of the government.
And fourth:
Fortitude – or courage – is perhaps the most challenging of all.
This is the courage to deviate from the norm when applying the rules too strictly would result in injustice.
It requires professionals who are willing to take responsibility, even if doing so creates tensions.
The cardinal virtues are the soul of the law.
They serve as a bridge between written rules and the lived reality of justice.
In addition to the cardinal virtues, we also have legal principles
to guide us when legislation falls short.
Principles such as proportionality, due care, equality and legal certainty.
These help us to correct our course when legislation is too harsh or too general, or takes insufficient account of the individual.
In my view, these legal principles are not optional extras.
They are part of the same set of fixed standards from which the law arises.
But where the law is set in stone, these principles flow.
They keep the law alive.
In short:
Implementing the law is a task.
Applying it fairly is a responsibility.
And between the two lies the essence of just government.
That’s why government needs to always ask:
‘Are we doing right by the individual citizen?’
Our focus, after all, should be on the big picture:
How does legislation affect ordinary people’s lives?
Only by looking at the big picture can we preserve the balance between the all-powerful government and the individual citizen.
We’ve also seen that the more instructions and handbooks we produce, the less space there is for individual legal professionals to use their own judgment.
And the less scope there is to take account of individual situations.
That’s something else we see in all these scandals.
And yet, the job of ensuring a just society cannot be left to legal professionals alone.
Just as the rule of law serves our society, everyone, by which I mean all members of our society, must contribute to the rule of law.
How?
By remaining alert.
By sounding the alarm if we see something that’s not right.
By listening to people, even when they ask difficult questions.
Because history has taught us that some of them turn out to be canaries in the coal mine.
But we legal professionals do have a special role when it comes to defending the law. In my view, this is something we must do first and foremost within society. How do we treat each other?
And how does the government treat the public?
In my introduction I said that, to me, this lecture was about being true to your legal values.
Especially when you’re faced with a dilemma.
In that regard I always had great support from Alex Brenninkmeijer, who I mentioned earlier.
For more than 10 years he was the Netherlands’ National Ombudsman. After that he worked for the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg.
He was also a law professor and administrative judge.
But above all, he was a defender of the rights of citizens.
And he championed their rights before the government.
For him, justice began with the advice I cited at the start of my lecture:
‘Make sure that every evening you’re able to look at yourself in the mirror.’
When Alex Brenninkmeijer turned 70, and had to retire,
he gave me his robes.
Not long afterwards, he passed away unexpectedly.
For me, his robes represent wisdom.
Which is why I brought them with me today.
To show you that legal wisdom stems from asking yourself one simple question: Am I doing the right thing?
Tak for oppmerksomheten.