On 26 April 2018, the government announced its long-awaited vision of how it will improve legal protection for companies and citizens facing administrative fines. This special report is a response to the advice of the Council of State from 2015. In it’s advice, the Council of State asked for more attention from the legislator for the legal protection of those confronted with a fine. The background to this is that many laws provide for enforcement by means of the administrative fine and the maximum fine is sometimes even higher than that in criminal law, while the legal protection in administrative law lags behind. This leads to imbalances, especially since administrative law was intended for minor offences. In order to address this disparity and not (further) jeopardise the support within our society for the fine, the government formulated a large number of legislative initiatives in the special report, aimed in particular at bringing the differences in the level of fines more into line with each other. It is very questionable whether the proposed measures will lead to lower fines and more legal protection for citizens and companies.
The full blog post is written in Dutch.
Date: 7 May 2018
Author: Christien Saris