Hundreds of asylum seekers in the Expo Hall in Assen are staying there much longer than agreed, while the hall is not equipped for a long-term stay. Aid organizations the Refugee Council and UNHCR express sharp criticism of the situation in the hall. Asylum seekers have a daily reporting obligation, do not receive a living allowance and are given a room check every morning.
Since last summer, the Expo Hall in Assen has been intended as a waiting room for unregistered asylum seekers, when the registration center in Ter Apel is too busy. There is room for five hundred people. It has been agreed with the municipality of Assen that people will stay there for a maximum of five days. The shelter is deliberately soberly furnished.
But instead of just a few days, people are now being accommodated in the hall for weeks or even months. And a large part has now been registered with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). This is evident from conversations between RTV Drenthe and sources around the shelter.
At the Expo, asylum seekers are faced with strict rules, which almost only apply to people who still have to register with the IND and the Aliens Police. For example, they must report every day to the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA).
“COA is making do with resources that they do not have,” says Mirjam Laan of the Council for Refugees, who visits the shelter every week. “They are doing their best, but the conditions in the Expo are inhumane. There is no privacy and it is too noisy.”
According to Laan, there are single men, but also elderly people, women with very young children and people with mobility problems. It is very noisy inside the 15,000 square meter event hall. “You hear everything that happens there. If there is a football match on TV, the children do not sleep,” says Laan.
In the Expo, rooms without ceilings have been created using partitions, containing bunk beds for four to six people. When, as in recent weeks, more than five hundred asylum seekers sleep in the hall, the rooms are expanded to six to eight beds.
A large number of the asylum seekers in the Expo Hall could move to a so-called process reception location (pol). People live there whose asylum application has been registered with the IND, but do not yet have a residence permit.
At those locations people are entitled to living allowances, but at the Expo the asylum seekers do not receive that. Not even if they have to stay there for months. As a result, they are often unable to buy clothes or good food for themselves or their children. “It is painful to see how the parents suffer,” says Laan.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is critical of the situation in the Expo. Luke Korlaar, head of legal affairs of UNHCR Netherlands: “As soon as someone reports in Ter Apel and expresses their wish for asylum, all rights for asylum seekers should actually apply to you. So even someone in the waiting room should already receive living allowance. That people in the I think it’s unheard of to not receive a living allowance at Expo.”
According to the highest court, it is not against the law that unregistered asylum seekers do not receive living allowances, says Karen Geertsema, assistant professor of migration law at Radboud University. “But if the shelter lasts longer, and people are already registered, they would essentially have to stay in a pol. People have been receiving living allowances there since April 5, 2024,” says Geertsema.
Escaping the conditions in the hall for a few days, for example to visit family elsewhere in the Netherlands, is difficult. There is a daily reporting obligation for everyone in the shelter. All rooms are also checked every morning.
Violating the reporting obligation may have consequences for the asylum application. An exception can only be made with the permission of the COA.
Korlaar of the UNHCR is cracking down on this daily reporting requirement. According to him, it is important for people without registration to report regularly, because they can be called for their registration at any time. “But people who are already registered have the right and freedom to go wherever they want.”
