The security regions want the national government to be able to force municipalities to receive additional asylum seekers. That is one of the outcomes of the Security Council, a meeting between the 25 chairmen of the security regions.
“Instruments should really be made that the central government can exercise coercion and point out to a municipality of: you are now going to accept these people because it will not go on like this,” said chairman Hubert Bruls after the meeting. The security regions also agreed that in the short term they will realize 2000 extra places for asylum seekers.
‘Giant problems’
Asylum seekers centers in the Netherlands have been closed for months overloaded† Thousands of refugees live in tents and large halls without privacy and tranquility. The situation is especially dire in the national application center of the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) in Ter Apel. Asylum seekers are registered there and normally received overnight.
The location can accommodate 250 people. But because the flow to reception centers is stalling, there are 500 to 700 people too many every day, according to Groningen mayor Koen Schuiling, chairman of the Groningen Security Region, which includes Ter Apel.
“That creates huge problems with regard to safety and the risk of disease,” he tells news hour† “The hygienic conditions are also very bad.” On Saturday, COA even put, without permission, a pavilion tent down to accommodate a little more people. It will be demolished on Thursday.
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The government must be able to say: you will cooperate in the reception of status holders or asylum seekers.
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A number of municipalities have promised to receive people from Ter Apel. In Utrecht, for example, 200 temporary places will be placed in an old casino.
Finding more places is very difficult, according to mayor Sharon Dijksma. She hopes for emergency legislation from The Hague. “If we look for space and there is vacancy, we have to be able to use those spaces. Now we have to roll the hat around. If that’s the way we have to do that for all the thousands of people who still come in Then we’re not going to fix it.”
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Utrecht is temporarily realizing 200 extra crisis shelter places in this old casino
ANP
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For the short term, the promises to Ter Apel are sufficient, says Mayor Schuiling. “But whether they will materialize remains to be seen. And it will not help to solve the structural problem that we have been facing for months.”
The thousands of Ukrainian refugees have made the problem even more acute. In addition, as of April 1, thirteen municipalities will cancel their contract with COA, which means that the shelter for more than 2,500 people will disappear. As of May 1, another nine locations will close. “If that is actually achieved, we will be faced with the same situation as today in a few weeks,” says Schuiling.
Bruls: “This is already the umpteenth time that it is flooding in Ter Apel and people have to find themselves in inhumane conditions. So that structural solution in which you distribute people better across the country and allow them to pass more quickly must be achieved.”
And that includes coercion, Schuiling agrees. “There are municipalities where hundreds of places are available that they do not make available. And so the government must be able to say: you will cooperate in the reception of status holders or asylum seekers.”
‘Emergency Act of Last Resort’
In addition, the 25 mayors are calling for four extra registration centers for asylum seekers to spread the pressure more across the country. They also want municipalities to allow status holders (asylum seekers with a residence permit) to move on more quickly to ordinary homes, so that more places become available in asylum seekers’ centers.
State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Asylum and Migration, VVD) says he will submit the wishes of the municipalities to the cabinet. Earlier, a ministry spokesman said the emergency law to force municipalities to provide extra shelter is a “last resort”.
