A cup of soup, a plaster or a warm blanket on a cold winter evening. It can all be forbidden help for asylum seekers who stay in the Netherlands illegally. According to the Council of State, care providers may be punishable as a result of the amended asylum law.
Just before the summer recess, the House of Representatives met stricter asylum laws. Criminalizing illegality, after an amendment from the PVV, was added to the so -called Asylum Measures Act. That is a package with measures that should make asylum policy in the Netherlands stricter.
The condition was that the Council of State would consider that addition to the law. He has done that now.
Critics of the law have difficulty “being punished”. A feeling that also lives with social worker Pieter Wittenberg, against whom a criminal case is on suspicion of, among others, human smuggling.
From a boat he accompanied asylum seekers who made the crossing from Turkey to the coast and, for example, handed out life jackets.
“It shows how deep we have failed in the Netherlands,” says Wittenberg. “And not in the Netherlands alone, but throughout Europe, this kind of thinking is becoming more and more normal. The core is for me that there is a punishment for humanity. The question is: if someone is in need, do you first check the wrist or ask for the papers?”
They also notice that in the church of the church church Open Hof in Kampen. The Babyants family lives there. “We are happy with the clear statement by the Council of State, but the minister’s ruling really worries us. That the person receiving the help becomes punishable,” says Hermans Stomphorst.
“Criminaling does not help and maintaining is not feasible. They are now almost more religious than the church, by believing in their own idea,” says Stomphorst. According to him, the human rights must first look before other laws and rules are made. “Show a human face.”
In addition, according to him, the government must invest in organizations that can really help people to return safely to their own country.
Almost eighty organizations, including Amnesty International, the Netherlands Refugee Work, Doctors Sans Frontières and Oxfam Novib, the Senate called against the Asylum Measures Act and the two -state system. Stomphorst also hopes and expects that the law will not be passed.