Participation of Citizens in Pre-Trial Hearings:Review of an Experiment in the Netherlands.

In 2011 the Dutch Central Appeals Tribunal, the highest Dutch court ofappeal in legal areas pertaining to social security and the civil service, startedconsulting the parties of a dispute at an early stage in the procedure, in orderto include them in the decisions about the procedural steps to be taken inthe settlement of the appeal. One of the underlying rationales is that theinvolvement of the parties will lead to more acceptance of and contentmentwith the result. Since the acceptance of court decisions is considered as acriterion for the quality of the procedure, this approach should result in abetter quality of the case treatment. In this article the initial results of this newcase treatment are presented in the light of expectations from the literatureon citizen participation in policy processes of public agencies. The dataindicate that the New Case Management Procedure at the Central AppealsTribunal can lead to an improvement of the quality of the case treatment, byinviting citizens to discuss with the judge about the case treatment. However,the procedure itself does not guarantee this increased quality