Demand for
compensation for victims of the social services
By Lennart Hane, Attorney-at-law
Excerpt from Lennart Hane's letter to the Minister
of Justice and the Minister of Health and Social Welfare of
"In my petition mention is also made of the serious mistakes on the part of the appointed representative of the child. I request that the Department not only makes a more careful examination of the peculiar attitude of this lawyer to the child's health, which can hardly be seen as other than mercenary accommodation to the power position of the social bureaucracy.
This anomalous state of affairs is not associated
with the lawyer in question but also infused into the system itself. The fact
the child is provided with a personal representative that is now transformed
into its deputy in the process, in the position of opposite party to the
parents, is a weakening of legal security/law and order. In those cases of mine
in which a successful reunion of child and parents has taken place and in which
compensation has been awarded to parents after a decision in the European
Commission or the
The social authorities already have a strong, not to say unjustifiably strong, position in the process of taking into care with enormous economic resources, a maximum of time for preparing material and ample opportunities to engage knowledgeable lawyers internally or externally, and, not least, unlimited access to psychological "expertise". Already in this respect, there appears such an imbalance between the parties that it is suspect that the social authorities are allocated a partner and a fellow actor in the form of the child's representative and deputy.
Nowadays, when there exists a desire to economise on public spending, something as destructive as the child's representative in connection with civil cases should be abolished."