12h45 - 14h  
D.041

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Fredrik Hjorthen (Univ. of Oslo)

In recent years, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) has been at the center of scandal and controversy. One reason for this is the well-documented failure to provide sufficient justification for decisions. Assuming that there is a right to justification, this is problematic in and of itself. But it is also true that people are differentially affected by this problem. Arguably, poor justifications disproportionately affect people who lack the administrative, legal, technical, and medical nous required to understand decisions and to formulate appeals without the requisite guidance from a properly formulated justification. Some groups, such as lingual minorities and people struggling with psychological illness, are particularly vulnerable to this problem. In this paper, I investigate whether NAV’s practice of providing clients with inadequate justifications amounts to wrongful discrimination. I (preliminary) argue that NAV’s practice can constitute both direct and indirect discrimination.