NOS news•
The formation parties PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB want “more control on migration”, as happened today again from an illustrated negotiation document. Behind the scenes, negotiators are referring to measures from Belgium as an option to deal with the reception problem.
But how do you like this policy in Belgium?
A priority for families
Belgium’s measure last August was surprising: single male asylum seekers would no longer receive shelter and food. The reason was the great lack of places for asylum seekers.
“If we have a lack of places, despite all efforts to find extra beds … well, I will give priority to families with children,” said Secretary of State De Moor about the decision.
Since then, men have been able to register as asylum seekers when they arrived at the registration center, but then have to wait on the street. They are, however, claiming a place in a homeless shelter. However, there is not room for everyone there: in Brussels alone there are more than 7,000 homeless people, and there are 5,000 shelters for them.
The men who travel through Brussels receive help from a charity that provides food and other groceries, Nieuwsuur showed last year in this video:
Asylum seekers are taking to the streets in Brussels because there are not too many shelters
Refugee groups from Belgium went to court to challenge the measure, with legal success. The Belgian Council of State opposed the decision of Secretary of State De Moor. But the practice did not change.
As a result, thousands of young men wander the streets for weeks or months, waiting for the start of their asylum procedure. Officially it concerns 3,700 people, but there may be many more.
In The Hague, there is regular behind-the-scenes debate about Belgian policy. It is being asked if the Netherlands can adopt that policy to prevent asylum seekers from coming here.
At the same time, the parties see that Belgium is doing something that the judge is not allowed to do: refuse asylum to people. “But a new cabinet could, for example, ask the European Commission to approve this policy, despite the rules about it, because now we can no longer deal with it,” says one of the leaders of the negotiating parties about the emphasis on reception in the Netherlands.
Belgium receives more asylum seekers per capita than the Netherlands, according to figures from the European statistical agency Eurostat. In 2023, the Netherlands was slightly below the EU average with 2,221 asylum applications per million inhabitants; Belgium was at the top with 2999 asylum applications per million inhabitants.
It remains to be seen whether the measure has achieved anything for Belgium. The statistics show that the number of asylum applications has fallen since the measure was introduced at the end of August 2023, after a brief peak in the autumn. However, the same pattern was seen in the Netherlands, which did not introduce such a measure.
The graph below shows how the number of asylum applications has developed in Belgium and the Netherlands over the past 12 months:
-
NOS
Number of asylum applications in NL and BE per month -
NOS
The number of asylum applications per million inhabitants in the EU
According to Belgian asylum policy professor Pascal de Bruyne, the policy has not worked “so far”. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be 3,700 people still on that waiting list, who live miserably in homelessness.”
De Bruyne therefore believes that it is not a “good idea” if the Netherlands follow Belgium in this approach and points out that the position is “illegal”. According to him, the Belgian state has already been condemned more than 10,000 times for inappropriate reception, including the European Court of Justice.
“The fact that it has to be prioritized has to do with the fact that people don’t choose to distribute asylum seekers evenly across municipalities,” he says. “So people really make a political choice to not have enough asylum.”
Unsafe
The high number of homeless asylum migrants in Brussels has long led to unsafe conditions. At the beginning of 2023, a man died in a building on Paleizenstraat that had been dispersed by homeless asylum seekers; there was also vomiting infectious diseases out.
Belgian asylum lawyer Mieke van den Broeck called the situation in Belgium at the time “even worse than in Greece, in those overcrowded reception camps.” At least there they have tents, food and drinks.”
According to De Bruyne, the problem is moving from national shelter organizations to local authorities. For example, asylum seekers who cannot go to the registration center travel to Ghent, where they also wait with hundreds of asylum seekers. “So you can see that asylum seekers are against these local authorities in the streets. There is a lot of pressure on local authorities.”
2024-05-06 14:31:56
#Creation #parties #measure #Belgium #men #asylum #ceremony
