About a hundred asylum seekers from the emergency shelter in Leeuwarden took to the streets today because they can no longer tolerate the situation in the shelter. Not only is there only 2.5 square meters of space available per person at night, it is also so noisy and stuffy that adults and children have a hard time sleeping.
Today, the asylum seekers first spoke to the National Ombudsman Reinier van Zutphen, who has been warning for some time about distressing situations in the jammed asylum reception. “I try to ensure that people are received faster and that facilities are made faster by talking to all authorities,” he says. “The important thing, of course, is that we show solidarity with these people and create space where they can await their asylum application in a humane way.”
This is what the protest in Leeuwarden looked like today:
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Asylum seekers express their dissatisfaction on the street in Leeuwarden
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But that waiting is precisely the problem. According to the IND itself, a third of asylum applications take longer than the legally permitted period of six months. Most asylum seekers have been waiting in Leeuwarden for eight months for a response from the IND after the intake interview in Ter Apel upon arrival in the Netherlands.
The large exhibition hall of the WTC in Leeuwarden was once intended as an emergency shelter, but now 600 people have been living on top of each other for eight months. Children complain that they cannot sleep because there is a space of about ten square meters per family or four separate people. And that while the city council already voted two years ago for a permanent asylum seekers’ center within the municipal boundaries. But that has not happened so far.
Tents and sports halls
The problems in Leeuwarden are not isolated: the asylum reception in the Netherlands is hidden throughout the chain. Anyone arriving at the application center in the Netherlands in Ter Apel often has to wait days for the IND to process the application. There are no beds available for the guards, because all shelters throughout the Netherlands are full.
State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Eric van der Burg has now announced that crisis shelters must be provided and that municipalities must make tents and sports halls available. But that too is only meant for a few nights.
And according to mayor Buma van Leeuwarden, it is not a solution for the residents of emergency shelters in his city. “The problem has only gotten bigger. The system has completely stalled. What we do here is take care of people because we want to do that from a social feeling, but the result is that they have been there for eight months now.”
No alternative
According to Buma, the few thousand crisis places that the State Secretary wants in every security region are not an alternative for the people in his emergency shelter. ”Then they come to sports halls and tents, you don’t want that either. Leeuwarden hoped to be able to offer some sort of solution with the emergency shelter, but now we are suddenly part of the problem. I would like to help people, but I can’t.”
The IND writes in a response to questions from news hour that due to ‘delayed migration’ after the lifting of the corona measures, the continued high influx from Syria and the unrest in Afghanistan, the service has been struggling with a growing number of asylum applications for months. The service is therefore “looking hard” for new colleagues and, in its own words, is doing everything it can to prevent asylum seekers from having to wait too long for a decision. “But unfortunately we can’t always prevent this.”
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