For the fourth night in a row, too many people spent the night in the registration center for asylum seekers in Ter Apel. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has stated this announced on Tuesday. With 2,197 people spending the night in Ter Apel, COA was almost 200 shelter places short.
At the end of February, the judge ruled that the COA must pay a daily penalty of 15,000 euros for every night that the center has more than two thousand asylum seekers. The fine amount that the COA owes to the municipality of Westerwolde amounts to 90,000 euros after tonight. In the ruling, the judge imposed a fine limit of 1.5 million euros.
In recent days, COA has been looking for solutions to tackle the capacity problem, such as temporary shelter in Biddinghuizen in Flevoland, but that was not possible every evening. According to the ANP news agency, the fact that the exceeded reception number on Tuesday morning was considerably higher than on previous nights, at almost 200 people, was 2, 21 and 42 respectively. The COA was not available for questions on Tuesday afternoon NRC.
The reception problems for asylum seekers in the Netherlands are structural and have meant for years that the government has been unable to provide enough people with overnight accommodation. For this purpose, the so-called dispersal law was devised, which should help arrange a fairer distribution of asylum seekers among municipalities and provide a total of 96,000 reception places. Municipalities in particular defended the law because they considered it coercion. The provinces now have until November to submit reception plans together with the municipalities to the Ministry of Justice and Security, which devised the dispersal law.