The National Ombudsman and the Ombudsman for Children released an alarming report today about the degrading situation of asylum seekers in crisis shelters. But Drenthe municipalities do not recognize themselves in that report.
“The crisis emergency shelter is intended to be temporary, but the asylum seekers who enter our country are there for up to eight months,” the Ombudsmen reported. Furthermore, the living conditions are substandard: “Families often live in small spaces and often cannot cook for themselves”, according to the report.
“There is also usually no daytime activities and children do not go to school. Another point is that asylum seekers often have to move. All this together has serious consequences,” says the ombudswoman for children. For example, children sometimes stop eating.
There are a total of 340 asylum seekers in Drenthe in the emergency shelter divided over seven municipalities; children also live in four municipalities. It usually concerns small-scale reception in hotels or former care locations. On some of them, people can cook for themselves and most children go to school.
For example, about fifty asylum seekers stay in former hotel De Biester in Gieten. Here, food is now arranged via catering, but soon people will be able to cook for themselves, according to a spokesperson for the municipality of Aa en Hunze. Asylum seekers have their own room with private bathroom. Almost all children go to school and for adults there are language lessons as a form of daytime activity.
The thirty asylum seekers can also cook for themselves at the crisis emergency shelter in Diever, says a spokesperson for the municipality of Westerveld. The asylum seekers can cook for themselves and the children go to school; transportation is arranged. According to the spokesperson, there is also sufficient privacy and the adults receive Dutch lessons.
The Red Cross reports that the maximum 45 asylum seekers can cook at the emergency shelter in Alteveer. There is enough space for privacy during the day, but overnight stays are partly shared. Three children of primary school age do not go to school. According to the spokesman, schools for asylum seekers are in any case faced with a lack of capacity, also due to the high number of children from Ukraine.
But even if the locations in Drenthe are reasonable, the asylum seekers are still often in a hopeless situation and there are many relocation movements. That is a problem that the municipalities cannot solve; that is up to the national government.
This is not the first report to conclude that asylum seekers in emergency shelters are in a harrowing situation. And yet nothing seems to happen. It is politically very sensitive. The House of Representatives will debate it again tomorrow.
State Secretary Eric van der Burg has already indicated that time is needed to get the number of regular asylum seekers’ centers back to the desired level. He hopes that from next year the so-called distribution law will ensure that more municipalities will help. But in the short term, not much will change in the crisis emergency shelter.