Forming parties look at Belgian measure: no men in asylum reception

NOS News•today, 4:31 PM

The forming parties PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB want “more control over migration”, as a photographed negotiation document showed once again today. Behind the scenes, negotiators mention measures from Belgium as an option to tackle the reception problem.

But how do you like this policy in Belgium?

The Belgian measure last August was a striking one: single male asylum seekers would no longer receive shelter and food. The reason was an acute shortage of places for asylum seekers.

“If we have a shortage of places, despite all efforts to find extra beds… well, then I will give priority to families with children,” State Secretary De Moor said about the decision.

Since then, men have been able to register as asylum seekers upon arrival at the registration center, but then have to wait on the street. They do, however, claim 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, while there are 5,000 shelter places for them.

The men wandering through Brussels receive help from a charity that provides food and other groceries, Nieuwsuur showed last year in this video:

Asylum seekers are wandering the streets in Brussels because there are too few shelters

Belgian refugee organizations went to court to challenge the measure, with legal success. The Belgian Council of State overruled State Secretary De Moor’s decision. But the practice did not change.

The result is that 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 are probably many more.

In The Hague, there is regular discussion behind the scenes about policy in Belgium. The question is asked whether the Netherlands could adopt that policy in order to deter asylum seekers from coming here.

At the same time, the parties see that Belgium is doing something that the judge is actually not allowed to do: refuse shelter to people. “But a new cabinet could, for example, ask the European Commission to allow this policy, despite rules about it, because now we can no longer cope with it,” says one of the leaders of the negotiating parties about the squeeze 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 just below the EU average with 2,221 asylum applications per million inhabitants; Belgium was above with 2999 asylum applications per million inhabitants.

Whether the measure has achieved anything for Belgium remains to be seen. 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 visible in the Netherlands, which did not introduce such a measure.

The graph below shows the development of the number of asylum applications in Belgium and the Netherlands over the past 12 months:

According to Belgian professor of asylum policy Pascal de Bruyne, the policy has not worked “until now”. “Otherwise there would not still be 3,700 people on that waiting list, who are surviving miserably in homelessness.”

De Bruyne therefore thinks it is “not a good idea” if the Netherlands follows Belgium in this approach and points out that the situation is “illegal”. According to him, the Belgian state has already been convicted more than 10,000 times for inadequate reception, including by the European Court of Justice.

“The fact that priority must be given has to do with the fact that people do not choose to distribute asylum seekers evenly across municipalities,” he says. “So people are actually making a political choice to have insufficient asylum reception.”

The high number of homeless asylum migrants in Brussels has long led to unsafe situations. At the beginning of 2023, a man died in a building on Paleizenstraat that had been squatted by homeless asylum seekers; contagious diseases also broke 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 shifting 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 see that those local authorities are confronted with asylum seekers on the streets. The pressure on local authorities is enormous.”