Proposition 53K3233

Projet de loi portant réforme de la compétence, de la procédure et de l'organisation du Conseil d'Etat.

General information ¶

Submitted by

The Senate

Submission date

Oct. 7, 2013

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

administrative reform administrative court

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

CD&V Vooruit LE PS | SP Open Vld N-VA LDD MR

Abstained from voting

Groen Ecolo VB

Party dissidents ¶

• Bernard Clerfayt (MR) voted to reject.
• Olivier Maingain (MR) voted to reject.

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Discussion ¶

Jan. 9, 2014 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker. The reason for this reform was the criticism that the State Council has suffered in recent years. It was then about criticizing the effectiveness of administrative justice. Even the short-term process and certain measures are often perceived as excessive formalism. The power of the State Council to annul an act was sometimes seen as disproportionate to the irregularities sanctioned.

In this context, the government agreement provided for a reform. I quote: “In order to better respond to the concrete concerns, the Government, in the interests of law seekers and administrative authorities, in cooperation with the Council of State will make proposals to improve, examine and approve the judicial system for the Department of Administrative Justice of the Council of State.”

A second part of the governmental agreement concerned the possibility for the State Council to take a decision on the private law consequences of a cancellation. This point has led to the establishment of a compensation for damage to recovery, taking into account all circumstances of public and private interest. This has already been adopted in the framework of the state reform.

The reform proposed in this draft law is, in the opinion of the Minister, a qualitative reform, since it must primarily enable the State Council to refine the judicial review of legality by designating judgments ordering measures other than merely the cancellation without a doubt.

The administrative loop should enable the government to repair a minor irregularity after the conclusion of a debate on contradiction and under the supervision of the State Council.

There are also other measures aimed at improving the procedure at the State Council by facilitating access to this High Court, or by allowing the State Council to focus on the substance of the case rather than on unnecessary formalist irregularities.

Finally, the organization and competence of the State Council were also revised.

Several bills were attached to this bill. In the meantime, the President has mentioned them. I think the authors of these bills will submit their explanations soon.

It is very important that these reforms were supported almost unanimously. The bill was adopted in the committee with 15 votes for and 1 abstinence. The proposed legislation was therefore without object.

I now go to the presentation on behalf of my group.

The upcoming reforms that will be voted for are fundamental and urgently needed. The State Council is the requesting party for this. The main good news outlined in the draft is, in particular, that there will be a better coordination between the procedure at the State Council and mediation, suspending the limitation period for appealing to the State Council when the Ombudsman is invoked. There is also a simplification of the conditions for legal persons for access to the Council of State, in which, among other things, a lawyer no longer has to prove that he is the representative of a legal person: he gets the refutable presumption that he is the lawyer of that legal person.

The introduction of the interest in the plea and the avoidance of annulment on the basis of an irregularity, while this does not have any practical effect on the situation of the applicant, are also improvements. There are also changes to the execution of judgments, there is the power of injunction and there is also a penalty.

The main change is, in our opinion, the administrative loop: an interim arrest indicating how the deficiency can be corrected. If the administrative authority agrees with the correction, it shall, of course, immediately notify it in writing.

Finally, there is a simplification of internal procedures, for example for the hiring of officers. It is considered to remove the lags by extending the measure for recruiting and expanding personnel.

On the basis of the figures given by the Minister in the Senate, we have further debated in the Chamber Committee the reason why there is such a difference in workload between the French-speaking chambers and the Dutch-speaking chambers. The Minister had an objective explanation: on the French-speaking side there are more disputes concerning foreigners than should be dealt with on the Dutch-speaking side. In addition, the Dutch-speaking side has a decree by which all construction disputes were removed from the Council of State and entrusted to another jurisdiction.

Logically, the question then arises is whether the proposed reform will also affect the backwardness of the French-speaking chambers. The Minister confirmed that the lag will be removed, ⁇ with regard to the contentieux of foreigners, by hiring additional staff. Particularly remarkable was the progressive insight of the Minister that a new administrative court for building permits is also being considered on the French-speaking side, in the Wales region. What works well in Flanders is taken over by the French.

We also had a joint bill, with the subject of the controversy surrounding the revision of Article 195 of the Constitution, in which one can amend the Constitution once in a legislature.

Our proposal was that the Council of State should intervene as a guarantee for a correct and sound constitutional revision, as there is a legal debate among prominent legal scholars about this technique. This discussion cannot be resolved because there is no institution in the field that can deliver a final opinion. The State Council, the Legislation Department, is not entitled to advise on constitutional texts.

With our proposal, we are removing that gap. We proposed that the Council of State be empowered to take decisions on proposals and draft amendments to the Constitution. The State Council is intended to check whether the constitutional review procedure has been properly followed. The involvement of the State Council can therefore guarantee that the regulatory texts are of a high level and that any discussion on the legality of a Constitutional review is resolved.

The Minister considered that this bill should not be added, but we did not agree with it. We believe that if one fundamentally changes the organization of the Council of State, one can also make the powers subject to discussion.

We will approve the bill because it is a good bill. Nevertheless, we have submitted an amendment again, which I hope colleagues will read carefully. In the meantime, it is on the banks.

It is a technical matter. Per ⁇ the attention in the committee was already somewhat diminished at the time we submitted it, but the amendment can now be re-approved. You can study it in peace. I hope I can convince my colleagues of this.

In this amendment, we request that the opinions of the Council of State be bundled annually into a Bulletin of opinions of the Council of State.

The responsibility for this lies in the fact that the opinion of the Department of Legislation is, as a rule, mandatory for all draft laws, decrees and ordinances and except in cases of high urgency for all drafts of KB, while this advice is optional for bills.

Therefore, the opinions of the State Council are not systematically published. Only opinions on preliminary draft laws, decrees and ordinances and draft regulatory decrees, in which a report is published to the King or to the community or regional government, are mandatory.

According to eminent authors, it is ⁇ regrettable that opinions of the Council of State are not systematically published. This prevents a systematic study of the opinions of the State Council. Such a study is important because many textbooks from constitutional law are written by the State Council.

In concrete terms, we therefore propose to insert an article 5bis into the coordinated laws of the State Council, which introduces the annual publication of all opinions of the Law Division of the State Council. Each of these opinions shall be notified by the Chief Grifier to the Parliaments and Governments.

I would like to thank my colleagues for listening so closely to this yet very interesting matter, the reform of the State Council. I hope you support our amendment.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Minister, dear colleagues, I will not go back in detail to the elements contained in the draft: you have already echoed them through the report. I will rather present a critical analysis; I have informed the minister and colleagues in the committee, but, unfortunately, it did not have the opportunity to be sufficiently developed and followed because of a clear will to move forward quickly in this bill.

At the time, everything had to go quickly. Moreover, at the limit, the minister’s employees themselves were surprised by the speed of the work; the request for hearing from various stakeholders involved was not accepted. This problem, however, has existed for many years and therefore nothing justified this precipitation.

The objective of these reforms would be praiseful and positive provided that it would allow an improvement in the function of the State Council as a fence for the justiciable against an arbitrary state. But the present reform tends more toward a reform in favor of the administration, that is, which aims to avoid at all costs the pure and simple cancellation of an act, without real compensation for the justiciable; this is therefore not better protected through this reform.

The reforms envisaged by the bill do not meet the objective of a faster correction of the damage caused, but rather it is a reform in favor of the administration: mandatory powers, indications, administrative loopholes, or possible procedures to avoid a pure and simple cancellation so much denied by the administration, because sometimes damaging or delaying some large projects.

On the other hand, the compensation to the justiciable, i.e. facilities for legal persons, an improvement of the referred procedure with the abandonment of irreparable serious damage and, in part, the repeatability of lawyer fees (it may have a double cut), do not have the weight compared to the benefits granted to the administrations by this reform.

During the discussions in the committee, Ecolo-Groen would have wanted to join other dimensions of necessary reforms, also long-awaited, relating to the State Council.

Among these reforms, let us pinpoint the possibility for associations to be in court.

We have requested that this proposal be analyzed at the same time as the bill. On this occasion, we had not the pleasure, but the surprise of attending a kind of ping-pong game between the House and the Senate by representatives of majority parties. In the House, we were told that the texts would be worked out in the Senate. In the Senate, work was postponed; it was said that hearing was needed and, in the end, there was no progress on this text.

I hope there will be correction and real progress on this text. You will acknowledge that the way the work has been carried out around the deposited text concerning the State Council reform does not inspire us to trust.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit amendments on behalf of our group to reintroduce the possibility for associations to appear in court. This is planned in a rational and cautious manner.

We say that these associations must act in order to defend a collective interest. They must meet conditions such as enjoying legal personality for at least one year. The association concerned must demonstrate that it regularly, effectively and sustainably pursues activities related to its social object and that it acts in court in the context of its social object in order to ensure the defence of a collective interest in relation to that object.

We hope that those who, both in the House and in the Senate, say that they find important this right to be in court for associations, will support this amendment.

We will be able to reintroduce some other amendments that I had also submitted in the committee. The responses or interactions obtained from the minister or his collaborators did not allow us to feel reassured. Especially, they did not provide a solution to the problems posed.

Among these amendments is a truly indispensable improvement at the level of the State Council reform, namely the entry of the publication of the opinions of the Legislative Section of the State Council.

Why have we returned? Why are we so surprised that this amendment has not been accepted? In 1997, the publication of the opinions of the administration section was integrated. In 2008, the Senate adopted a bill aimed at making the publication of the legislative section’s opinions mandatory.

Unfortunately, this text has fallen into expiration, due to the suspension of the work of the House and the Senate due to the elections. This project was not declared expiration, but it was adopted for its relevance.

Since the insertion in the Constitution of a provision that grants everyone the right to consult any administrative document, it has become possible to request to consult the opinions of the legislative section of the State Council which are held by an administrative authority, but this approach is complicated and not automatic.

Furthermore, the Administrative Section of the State Council ruled, in the 1996 GERFA judgment, that an opinion of the Legislative Section was a mandatory element of the procedure for the preparation of a regulatory decree and that it should, therefore, be incorporated into the administrative file that is submitted by the authority in the event that that decree is the subject of a request for annulment before the State Council.

In conclusion, several professors believe that the principle of confidentiality of opinions can no longer be considered as self-evident by the State Council, but that, nevertheless, an explicit modification of the law is necessary for the State Council to comply with this obligation and does not consider that its opinions can be kept confidential as long as there is no legislative obligation.

It would have been normal and democratic to accept these amendments and take the time to work on them. This was not the case. Therefore, we are putting them back to the plenary session today.

Another dimension that would have been interesting to add to a reform of the State Council – which is not done every three months – was the introduction of a quota of women in the State Council. In this regard, we re-submit the amendment, because no argument or element justified that we renounced supplementing this reform with this provision. Our amendment does not concern the functioning of the State Council but its composition, which should be as paritary as possible in our opinion, the institutions of justice should, indeed, be the example.

Our amendment provides for the presence of at least 40% of members of different sexes in the audit board and in the Coordination Office of the State Council. At least half of the State Councillors shall be appointed by the members of the Audit Committee and the Coordination Bureau. It can therefore be deduced that if a gender-balanced presence is ensured within the auditory and within the coordination office, it will be easier to ensure a gender-balanced presence among the counselors.

A fourth amendment that we will submit today at the plenary session allows me to explain elements, for us insufficient, in the reform proposed by the minister: the limitation of the scope of the administrative loop, in order to protect the justiciable. It is important to avoid harming a third party if the administrative loop is used.

This loop consists in offering the State Council the possibility to propose to the author of the contested act to modify his act. If the public authority decides to correct the vicious act, the parties may make known their position following this correction. If the correction of the defect is satisfactory, the appeal will therefore be rejected. Otherwise, the contested act or, where applicable, the act to be re-made, will be cancelled. In addition, the State Council will be allowed to say in its decision what needs to be amended. This means that the administrative loop will primarily allow to maintain in the legal order, an act that would be illegal but whose illegality could be corrected. This seems superfluous.

Many questions remain unanswered.

The purpose of the correction to be made is not clearly defined in the text. What about the vices not detected by the applicant and the vices of public order?

The identity of the author of the correction is also questionable. The bill suggests that he would not necessarily be the author of the contested act.

The minister said the administrative loop was inspired by the Dutch model, but there are several significant differences between the two systems. Therefore, it is not possible to assert that the Belgian administrative loop will have positive effects similar to those seen in the Netherlands. Indeed, the Dutch administrative loop is an instrument enabling the final resolution of a conflict while the Belgian administrative loop is only an instrument among others to try to avoid a pure cancellation of an administrative act. The Dutch loop can be applied for all vices invoked or exposed while the bill limits the use of it by the State Council to a few minor vices. The Dutch Council of State orders the administration to correct its act through the administrative loop, which allows to put a final point to the cause, while the Belgian Council of State will only be able to invite the administration to correct its act by an interim decision, before making a final judgment.

Finally, in the Netherlands, the vicious act corrected by a new act is cancelled. The appeal therefore results in the annulment of the act while the administrative loop to the Belgian, even if it allows a correction of the vicious act, rejects the appeal brought, which could have problematic consequences in terms of procedural costs to be paid by the justiciable and therefore access to justice.

What does the citizen gain from the creation of the administrative loop established through this reform of the State Council? For Ecolo-Groen, it is above all a new instrument among others in favor of the administration in order to avoid the cancellation of an act rather than in favor of improving or accelerating the procedure before the Council of State. However, the text could easily be improved in order to better protect the entitled to an advantage granted to the administration. For example, if the appeal is rejected, in case of correction of the act vicious by the administration, the justiciable who filed the appeal would be imposed the payment of the procedural compensation. In order to avoid this, Ecolo-Groen has resubmitted an amendment so that, in this case, the costs of the proceedings will be borne by the faulty administration.

In addition, in the Dutch version, as I said recently, it is provided that the implementation of the loop cannot infringe the rights of third parties. This requirement is not included in the bill under consideration. It is not clearly stated that third parties will have a new appeal against the corrected decision or against the new decision. Even if these are details, less or less important elements – I refer here to the argument put forward by the minister – we consider that this condition of application should be added to the administrative loop.

Finally, I would like to come to a last point that I think is important. In our view, it is necessary to force the Council of State to examine all the remedies invoked rather than one, thus inspired by the Wallon text creating a Council of Disputes in Urban Planning, and more ⁇ the examination of the petition. That is why we have submitted an amendment.

We would like these amendments to be taken into account and supported by the members of this Parliament. In fact, these are tools that allow not only a more democratic and efficient functioning of our administrations, but above all a better relationship between citizens and the administration.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Deputy Prime Minister, like the previous speaker, I regret the conditions under which the House was brought to work on this important bill. The reflection on the organization and competence of the administrative courts, and in particular of the Council of State, deserved a time of broader debate and at least more intense legal consultations with all relevant authorities.

A little like with the reform of the judiciary, one has the feeling that the will of the government is to propose a reform, which has ⁇ already been the subject of academic debates with a number of speakers, but to lead this reform drum beating, because, simply, there was some sort of emotional pressure related to the affairs that took place in the north of the country. Suddenly, it was the emotion following two rulings of the Council of State issued in cases which, if not negligible, were not of particular gravity. It was, on the one hand, the resignation of an official municipal officer in Antwerp, which gave rise to an annulment decision of the State Council and, on the other hand, an urban planning permit for the extension of a tram line. It is true that the State Council ruled several years after the petition was introduced, as is unfortunately too often the case. Those cases therefore justified the sudden emergence of a bill which, in my opinion, carries a greater legal uncertainty than the adequate answer to the real problem of the time within which the State Council normally decides.

If the State Council has such a backwardness, it may be necessary first to ask whether the latter has the human resources, i.e. magistrates and staff members, to handle matters in more diligent timeframes and then, if there is no reason to discharge it from a certain number of litigation, or in any case to have a reflection on the organization of administrative courts of first instance. This was done, for example, for the dispute of foreigners. There is ⁇ substance to do so for other types of appeals against administrative acts corresponding to the exercise of certain powers, whether in particular all administrative acts of the public service, which generate a large lot of appeals before the Council of State.

And instead of having a reflection on a new hierarchy of administrative courts, their independence and their status to ensure in particular total impartiality, we are presented with false procedural solutions in the context of the examination of annulment appeals by the State Council.

Like others, I am in favour of placing administrative courts within the judiciary. I am a fervent supporter of ending the derogatory regime that requires that the State Council, for historical reasons, falls, especially for its way of functioning and its organization, under the authority of the government, the executive power that serves as its administrative support. I believe it is time to have the will to say that the importance of the tasks of the State Council, which must guarantee by its impartiality the credibility of its functioning, justifies that the administrative courts are registered within the judicial power, which would have the advantage of creating also levels of appeal and in fine controls of legality by the Court of Cassation that would be very useful in some cases. This is, of course, a completely different option that is proposed here.

Professor Michel Leroy, professor of administrative contentious at the Free University of Brussels and magistrate at the State Council, recalls in the last edition (2008) of his Administrative Contentious that – I quote – “in regard to appointments to the State Council, the first unwritten condition and often kills is political. Each seat is assigned to a particular party, according to an approximately aligned distribution, with some variations, on their representation in the federal assemblies. Councillors do not necessarily have to be members of the party, and much less remain members of the party after their appointment, but they must have the support of the party. Only those who are presented unanimously by the General Assembly escape this constraint ... with, in addition, this paradox that the appeals against a decree appointing a State Councillor fall within the section of the administrative litigation of the State Council, which, despite the conclusions favorable to the system following a decision of the Constitutional Court in 2011, does not fail to raise questions regarding a risk of confusion of interests.

Therefore, I believe that there needs to be a reflection to strengthen the independence of the magistrates of the State Council. It is also known that political membership or the passage of some of them into ministerial cabinets gave rise to disputes of their jurisprudence subsequently, when they were state councillors. We would ⁇ not have today the jurisprudence of some Flemish chambers of the State Council if the appointment of the magistrates of the State Council were made according to modes with greater independence.

Therefore, there must be the will to get the State Council out of this political dependence. It would then be about renaming the State Council and placing the administrative courts within the judicial power.

Ms. Gerkens spoke of what is probably the biggest controversy in the academic and professional circles: the administrative loop.

This is a system of confusion. I know that the Netherlands knows a different culture and that in some cases we have been inspired by it to some extent. By the way, differences are sometimes even more risky for what is happening in front of the State Council in the Netherlands.

This is a complete confusion of roles. An administrative court does not have the role of an administrative adviser to an administration. The constant case-law of the higher courts reminds us of this confusion.

In their opinion, the lawyers of the French and German-speaking bars did not fail to warn about this risk. If, within the same institution, administrative and contentious formations may exist, impartiality prohibits an organization allowing a judge to know the contentious of a case on which he has given an opinion as a counselor and, more generally, it opposes that the same person addresses a case twice with two different titles. Rightly, the French-speaking bars cited a broad jurisprudence from both the European Court of Human Rights and other courts, such as the Court of Justice of the European Union, and an abundant doctrine in this regard.

It is therefore the establishment of a system that risks to prove dangerous. Indeed, let us assume that the State Council can carry out this work with all the rigor desired. What happens if, after having responded to the invitation of the State Council, by an interim decision, to correct the administrative act which presents a procedural defect, in particular, in the subsequent examination, at the time of deliberation, the State Council must establish that other means, including the remedies raised on its own, the remedies of public order, justify the cancellation?

There will then be created an appearance of legal certainty following the invitation made to nevertheless arrive in final to the cancellation of the act. In my opinion, this confusion will raise more questions than legal certainty.

This advance, which some believe to be in the advantage of the administrator, it seems to me, will rather be in the disadvantage of the administrator and will create insecurity within the administrative authorities which, in some cases, will believe that they have done right to the request of the State Council and be thus secured, while they may not be in fine by the deliberation that the State Council will take on the appeal.

Similarly, I do not believe that the State Council should become competent, a fortiori if it is out of judicial power – that is why I advocate that it be integrated into the judicial power – to decide on the litigation of compensation, in particular because the protection of civil rights belongs to the judicial power.

If we want to move towards this evolution, we must make the State Council evolve into a jurisdiction of the judicial power. At this point, one can have a consistency of litigation because we are in a pyramid structure of the judiciary with possible appeals to higher courts.

Here, we make the choice of a poorly cut ratio, especially with cumulative problems that may arise. I am referring, among other things, to the problem of the time-modulated effects of a requested judgment attacking an administrative act on an individual basis. When does the damage arise and does it justify that the State Council decides on the compensation, in so far as there is an eventually delayed consequence of the legal effect of the State Council decision? This is a problem! Would the State Council then completely empty its discretion over the claim for compensation? This is another problem.

Once again, a gender confusion has been created and it would have been better to leave full jurisdiction to the courts of the judiciary, since there is still no logic of administrative jurisdiction within the judiciary, to decide on the litigation of the compensation because the assessment of the damage following a judgment of the Council of State is often done more accurately and the damage is sometimes assessed differently than the mere finding of the illegality of the act attacked by the courts of the judiciary.

I believe that once again the intention is to make the State Council assume a competence that it will not be able to properly grasp, or in any case that could still be in competition with what the injured party would possibly wish to obtain before the judicial authority for a related damage that would not have been properly assessed by the State Council.

We are therefore moving towards more contradictions between the decisions of the State Council and those of the judiciary rather than towards a great clarification.

For all these reasons, Mrs. Minister, and for others, we have submitted amendments aimed at better publicity of a number of opinions of the State Council or to know the appeals brought before it, including against acts on an individual basis. In fact, this can often have consequences for third parties.

We believe that in this context of great legal uncertainty in which the bill is presented to us, we cannot support it. I thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I simply wanted to answer Mrs. Gerkens that I obviously disagree with the analysis relating to the lack of balance in the bill and a so-called arbitrary role, in which the State Council would suddenly become the adviser to the administration or the fact that this project would do the good part to the administration.

It is truly to forget the major achievements in this bill as regards the justiciable: the extension of the cancellation jurisdiction to the acts of some new non-administrative authorities, which is a plus for the justiciable; the way in which, in the case of legal persons of public or private law, the conditions of access have been greatly eased; the access to mediation with suspension, which is an important element for the justiciable; everything that falls within the improvement in the field of referred, which is also rejoiced by many organizations, because this really allows to have not only at all times but with much simpler conditions a capacity to refer. You are also forgetting – and it is not unnecessary – that the repeatability of lawyer fees is still a very important element for prosecutors as well as the system of injunction in matters of penalty that will be improved.

Our project, balanced in my opinion, shows progress both on one side and on the other.

Regarding the elements of which you have spoken, I see no objection to legislative initiatives that will be analyzed with interest in both the action in the collective interest and the publication of judgments. I would like to repeat that legislative acts are made public by publicity when a draft law is deposited and whatever happens, when one finds himself before the State Council, there is in any case an obligation of access to the opinion that was given on a royal decree that could be the subject of an annulment appeal. The accessibility capacity is relatively wide, but I am willing, if necessary, to analyze a bill on this subject.

As for the Dutch loop, its pernicious effects should not be underestimated. We were more cautious since we allowed this administrative loop only in the event of minor irregularities that did not change the direction. This avoids a trial in the trial and the reopening of debates that we did not want. This is one of the critics of the Dutch system.

Returning to the words of Mr. In the meantime, I can understand some surprises, especially when we have not followed the sufficiently technical discussions within the committee. The reintegration of administrative courts into the judiciary is a debate that took place during the negotiation – I was there – on the Sixth State Reform, a debate between the monists and the others. This is an old debate between the Latin or French vision of the State Council, a very beautiful debate to be reopened in the next legislature. In this case, the time was lacking and it was not the option that was chosen. On the other hand, it is true that, for the sake of coordination, rapidity and effectiveness, compensation in equity was allowed to the State Council, which several lawyers and judicial actors demanded. It is therefore a small part of the jurisdiction of the judiciary that is given to the State Council, in a very cautious manner.

As I just told Ms. Gerkens, I would like to insist on the fact that the State Council is not the adviser to the administration. It only highlights an irregularity that, without changing the meaning of the decision, can be corrected, which avoids a number of perverse effects, sometimes to other types of citizens. There are some unfortunate cases.

So I continue to think that this project is balanced, that it is widely supported and desired. Any proposed legislation can be analyzed beyond this vote.

Mr. Minister, if the appeal is rejected and there has been correction of the act vicious by the administration through the procedure of the administrative loop, the person who brought the appeal must bear the costs of the procedure. Do you not find that from the moment that there has been correction of an act, the administration or the person who brought the appeal must be exempt from paying? Per ⁇ the correction does not quite correspond to the way the appeal or complaint was filed, but the act had to be corrected. In this case, I believe that it is not logical to demand the application of the repeatability principle and that it is the faulty administration that should bear the costs rather than the justifiable.

On the other hand, you insist on the fact that our system is inspired, but is very different, from the Dutch system and that the differences relate to elements that do not fundamentally change things. In doing so, it is not necessary to reintroduce the possibility of making a trial in the trial. Nevertheless, I cannot understand the integration of terms according to which when a vicious act is corrected, it cannot harm a third party. It seems to me that the very foundation of a democratic functioning is to ensure that, when there is correction, one ensures that damage is not done to a third party.

Mrs Gerkens, since the correction must be made only for minor reasons and does not change the meaning of the act, I do not see how it could harm anyone. If the meaning had changed, ⁇ that would be the case. But as this is not the case, I do not see the type of damage that could exist. The same applies to repetition or not. To the extent that the meaning of the act is not changed and a technical correction is made, this means that there was no error on the substance and importance of the decision of the administration. That is why the rule has not been changed. Anyway, there will be assessments, but this is only a matter of minor points.