If it is up to the cabinet, the Netherlands will have a second application center for asylum seekers, in addition to the one in Ter Apel in Groningen. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has bought a piece of land for this purpose in Bant, which is located in the Noordoostpolder in Flevoland. The additional application center should relieve the pressure on Ter Apel.
The COA submitted an official request to the council of the Noordoostpolder municipality on Wednesday for the construction of the application center, State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Asylum) writes in a letter to the House of Representatives. The center must be located on a plot “within walking distance of the existing asylum seekers’ center in Luttelgeest”. The location should provide about 250 to 300 reception places.
The intention is that the new center in Bant will accommodate asylum seekers who have just entered the Netherlands. In time, Bant should become a second Ter Apel, currently the only place in the Netherlands where asylum seekers can submit their first asylum application.
Before that happens, the center in Bant will become a place where, according to Van der Burg, they will go through the first steps in the asylum procedure. Consideration should be given to registering and identifying asylum seekers and carrying out medical checks.
This makes Bant in the first instance a kind of second Budel, another place in the Netherlands where asylum seekers are currently identified and registered. This means that asylum seekers first have to go to Ter Apel before they go to Bant (or Budel).
Municipality still needs to approve center
Whether the application center in Bant will actually be established will “fall or stand with the willingness of the Noordoostpolder municipality”, Van der Burg warns. He emphasizes that local residents will be involved in the plans. The government expects it to take another month or two before the center opens.
Van der Burg speaks of an “important step” in dispersing asylum seekers. “Now it is important to get started quickly with the realization of the application center and the associated permit procedures,” says the minister. The cabinet is “unabated” by looking for more application centers: two more are yet to be added. More reception locations are also needed to make the influx of asylum seekers “manageable”.
It has been too busy in Ter Apel for months. The COA therefore often takes the asylum seekers by bus to emergency reception locations elsewhere in the country. But that does not always work: asylum seekers had to sleep on chairs or in tents set up by the Red Cross on several occasions. In the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, about thirty asylum seekers slept outside the application center in Ter Apel.
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