# Unprecedented Injustice

*A documented case, told from the report of a Dutch parliamentary inquiry.*

Parents in the Netherlands who pay for childcare can claim a public allowance
towards its cost. In December 2020 a parliamentary committee, which had heard
its witnesses under oath, reported on how that allowance had been administered.
It called its report *Ongekend onrecht*: unprecedented injustice.[^ongekend]

The committee found that fundamental principles of the rule of law had been
violated. The benefits service of the tax administration had dealt with
parents as a group rather than one by one, taken an approach the committee
called all-or-nothing, and classed parents as acting with intent or gross
negligence; together, it said, these seriously breached the principle of doing
justice to each person's situation. Parents were wrongly branded as
intentional fraudsters. The reproach did not stop at the administration. The
legislature had passed a rigid law with no hardship clause and too little
attention to proportionality, the administrative courts had upheld its rigid
execution for years, and parliament had repeatedly been given information
late, incompletely and incorrectly.[^ongekend-findings]

The allowance belonged to ordinary working life: parents at work, children in
care, a claim the law itself offered. The committee's findings describe rules
that left no room for a particular family's circumstances, applied to parents
as a group, and institutions that each failed to correct the others.

Part II is about that ordinary life: what a person may do without asking
anyone's permission, what work, pay and contribution come to, what money cannot
buy, the same route to what is owed for everyone, the conditions a life depends
on and the creatures owed protection in their own right, the roles people hold
in each other's lives, and arrival. It
begins with one week in which the rules touch a single person and mostly stay
out of sight. The chapters show where each rule reaches and where it stops, and
why a pattern seen across a group decides nothing about any one person in it.

[^ongekend]: Parlementaire ondervragingscommissie Kinderopvangtoeslag,
    [*Ongekend onrecht*](https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-35510-2.html),
    Kamerstukken II 2020/21, 35 510, nr. 2, covering letter of 17 December
    2020. The committee held a parliamentary *ondervraging*, an inquiry
    with sworn hearings; the translation of its title is mine.

[^ongekend-findings]: The same report, pp. 7–8, "Constateringen: De
    rechtsstaat in het geding"; translations mine. The report's conclusions
    state no count of the families affected, and none is given here.

---

By dhilipsiva. Prose: CC BY 4.0.

Canonical: https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/read/part-2-unprecedented-injustice/

Source: https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/book-1/part-2-unprecedented-injustice.md