16 annual report 2012 sion, but we did not agree. We did not regard it as a threat against the nurses, but as the expression of a legal management view of the best way of handling workplace issues. Furthermore, the Chairman of the Regional Council had subsequently emphasised that public employees have an entrenched right to freedom of expression. The outcome was the opposite in a case (Case No. 2012-26) from the Royal Arsenal Museum, where an employee was summoned to a talk with her manager about her ‘loyalty’ in connection with a letter published in the newspaper Politiken. In her letter, the employee had criticised Danish museums for being more focused on visitor experiences than on research. In our opinion, the manager had created an unlawful uncertainty about the employee’s right to express critical opinions. The museum agreed, after the manager responsible had resigned. It is a fundamental principle that the administration must make itself understood by the individual citizen, but it does not always succeed. In Case No. 2012-27, a local authority had refused to extend a woman’s sickness benefit and transferred her to cash benefit. This was overturned by the Employment Appeals Board and the local authority therefore had to recalculate the cash benefit paid into sickness benefit. In this connection, the local authority made a number of errors, which among other things resulted in the woman later being ordered to pay a significant amount of outstanding tax and also finding it virtually impossible to understand the local authority’s calculations. We stated more generally that citizens must be able to see and understand what has happened in their case, and the local authority took various initiatives to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents. Some cases are characterised by authority decisions which in a way appear reasonable and understandable, but nonetheless lack the necessary legal basis. This applied, for instance, to Case No. 2012-9, where the Ministry of Children and Education had approved the exclusion by a technical college of a student from lessons because his qualifications were so poor that he was assumed to be unable to complete the training. Among other things, the Ministry referred to a legal principle that ‘no one is obliged to achieve the impossible’, but we believed that the students’ right to take part in lessons was so carefully regulated that the college could not expel the student with reference to a legal principle which is not found in legislation. A case which made an impression in a special way (Case No. 2012-10) concerned hospitals’ treatment of babies born alive, but inevitably dying, who are the result of late abortions. This was a case which we initiated on our own initiative

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