Bart Eeckhout is the main commentator.
The issue of reception, or rather non-reception, of adult male asylum seekers is beginning to take on very strange proportions. The Council of State rightly canceled the unlawful instruction of State Secretary Nicole De Moor (CD&V) to deny adult men the right to basic shelter. Aid workers and almost every legal scholar in the country rightly raised the alarm when the State Secretary subsequently ignored the Council’s ruling and announced that the illegal policy would continue anyway.
We have already come this far. It now appears that State Secretary De Moor’s instruction does not contain a mandatory order to turn male asylum seekers at the door. It now appears that the asylum services, where possible, still provided adult men with a place in the shelter. Good thing, too. The question now is why Mrs. De Moor was so proud to provoke with an illegal policy act that she never really pushed through in reality?
The answer is clear. The instruction was just a sham. It had to market the State Secretary as someone who does what she can, but is not afraid to impose tough rules, beyond the limits of what is acceptable in a constitutional state. The State Secretary and her party chairman, who preceded her on Asylum and Migration, knew that they would cause a stir with this show provocation. That was the intention. They may also have known that with this tactic they would provoke the green coalition partners to the limit, with the risk that the government would fall.
One of the greatest evils of contemporary politics is that spectacle takes over from good governance. A government member who feigns illegal policies – only to score points, not even to actually implement them – provides a cynical illustration of that evil tendency.
The damage is extensive. Belgium’s international reputation as a fully-fledged constitutional state is at stake. Several organizations are asking the European Commission and the UN to investigate human rights violations in our country. What an embarrassment for a country that hopes to finalize the European migration pact as EU president.
The damage is also in the political precedent. What argument can be made against future ministers who also want to unlawfully discriminate against minorities and take away their rights? If Vivaldi can do it, why not her?
The damage mainly lies in the rapidly disappearing support for maintaining a somewhat humane asylum policy. International migration is an extremely complex issue, but the concrete reception and assessment of candidate asylum seekers in this country is certainly not impossible. By giving the impression that this is the case, the State Secretary himself is arousing fear and opposition among parts of the population.
And why? To cultivate an iron image yourself? That Mrs. De Moor has no illusions. Her display provokes a bidding war among the right and the far right with increasingly more bizarre, illegal ideas. As CD&V threatens to experience: to the right of the far right you fly into the guardrails.
