4.11 On 1 December 1994, the Minister declared the author's objection unfounded. In reaching this decision he took into consideration the fact that the author had not been promised, as he claimed, that no steps affecting his legal status would be taken pending the outcome of the Boekraad Committee's inquiry. The Minister also noted that in anticipation of the Committee's recommendations, the dismissal was decided upon with the greatest possible care. In the Minister's view, the dismissal was due to proven unsuitability for the course, as reflected by the author's poor grades, and the author had not satisfactorily established the slightest causal relationship between his poor grades and the discrimination he claimed to have suffered. 4.12 The author appealed the decision to the Amsterdam District Court, which declared the appeal well-founded on the basis that the Minister should have incorporated the Boekraad Committee's findings in the decision-making process. The court also held that in appointing the SAS Committee, the Minister had implicitly taken responsibility for the problems experienced by ethnic minority students. Inasmuch as the other ethnic minority students had been given an opportunity for an individual assessment by the SAS Committee, whereas this had not happened in the author's case, the court ruled that the Minister had acted in a manner incompatible with the principle of equality. 4.13 On 27 February 1997, the Minister appealed the district court's judgement to the Central Appeals Tribunal. The Minister held, inter alia, that the district court had wrongly assumed that the author was in the same position as the nine ethnic minority students whose cases had been studied in the SAS Committee's inquiry. These nine students had all had their previous schooling in a country outside the Kingdom and had not been in the Netherlands for very long when they started their studies at the NPA. They were hence not yet fully integrated into Dutch society. These students had followed a separate entry procedure developed specially for "authentic" ethnic minority students, namely the PPA selection procedure set up under the Affirmative Action Plan. The author did not belong to this category. The selection procedure applied in his case deviated from the regular procedure for students of Dutch origin only in a few minor details. Therefore, there was no reason to subject the author to individual assessment by the SAS Committee. 4.14 The Central Appeals Tribunal declared the Minister's appeal well-founded and quashed the judgement of the district court. It held that neither the Boekraad Committee's report nor the SAS Committee's report provided any grounds for concluding that the author's poor performance was due to discrimination. It also held that the author's situation differed essentially from that of the students who had only lived in the Netherlands for a short time before starting their studies, who had a poor command of the Dutch language and were not yet fully integrated into Dutch society. There was therefore no question of any violation of the requirement of due care and/or the principle of equality.