The undocumented migrants who occupy the Brussels Beguinage church and the premises of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in the hope of regularization have started a hunger strike.
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The group of people occupying the three locations have united under the name ‘Union des Sans-Papiers pour la Régularisation’ (USPR). They demand for more than a hundred days clear and permanent criteria for regularization, but after dozens of actions in the capital and a meeting with State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Sammy Mahdi (CD&V) see no other way out than to go on a hunger strike. The silence of the politicians, they say, forces them to take this final action, because they feel, together with thousands of unregistered citizens and undocumented workers, made invisible.
The sans papers have been fighting for the right to work for several years and demand that they be used in shortage professions and other sectors where it is difficult to fill jobs during the corona crisis. This is because exercising a profession is necessary in order to meet the conditions of regularization on the basis of work.
Secretary of State Mahdi has said in the past that he does not want to be blackmailed by their actions. ‘Their residence is and will remain illegal, so they have to apply for regularization and end up in an asylum procedure. They will not just be regularized because of the sanitary crisis, ”said Mahdi.
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