The real issue is that the EEA Agreement and the two institutions of the EFTA pillar - ESA and the EFTA Court - have been downgraded practically from the start by chauvinist professors (not Professor Graver) and bureaucrats in this country, that the chapters on ESA and the EFTA Court in the Sejersted Report of 2012 are basically political pamphlets, that the EFTA Court has been constantly insulted as «more catholic than the Pope» in perfect distortion of the facts, that Norwegian courts and in particular the Supreme Court were systematically asked to refrain from referring cases to the EFTA Court, that Norwegian courts were inversely asked to refuse to follow the EFTA Court, that the Regjeringsadvokat, if an opinion of the EFTA Court did not suit him, participated in a parallel case before the ECJ and asked it to create a judicial conflict and so on.
The intellectual ground for NAV’s systematic breach of EEA law may have been prepared by today’s Regjeringsadvokat Fredrik Sejersted himself with his «theory» that the Norwegian government and administration must use the «room for manoeuvre» allegedly opened by the EEA Agreement. This called for policies that at least accepted (and perhaps encouraged) violations of EEA law. In the 2012 EEA Report, the notion of «room for manoeuvre» was referred to around 100 times. This is not compatible with good faith (details on all this in Carl Baudenbacher, Judicial Independence. Memoirs of a European Judge, Springer 2019).