For the time being, the national borders remain open

The Netherlands will be closed to all asylum seekers, at least temporarily. That is something for which various parties in the House of Representatives (PVV, Yes 21 and Forum for Democracy) have been advocating for some time. Local branches of the ruling party VVD joined the call for an ‘asylum stop’ since the Netherlands is confronted daily with images of hundreds of asylum seekers sleeping outside in Ter Apel.

Responsible State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Justice and Security, VVD) promised the House of Representatives in June to investigate the possibilities for such an asylum stop, but that has not yet come to fruition, as it turned out on Friday at the presentation of new asylum measures. The cabinet was, however, creeping in that direction, Van der Burg hinted, with extra checks by the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee at the borders and no longer taking in 1,250 refugees who were previously welcome.

Europe has no experience with an asylum stop where no asylum seeker enters the country. European and international UN human rights treaties do not allow this. Refugees must be able to apply for asylum in the country themselves. Nevertheless, situations have arisen in the last ten years that come close to such an asylum stop.

At the beginning of 2016, EU member Sweden limited asylum options so much that the number of applications in that country fell by about 80 percent within a year. Border controls were then introduced everywhere and asylum seekers were encouraged to apply from abroad. Asylum seekers who entered by train or by road over the Oresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark were escorted by bus to an application center in Malmö. There they went through an accelerated procedure. Stockholm, together with Brussels and other EU Member States, arranged aircraft charters that returned exhausted parties to countries such as Morocco and Afghanistan.

Skeptical

The intervention was a heavy-handed correction to what had happened the year before. Sweden, known for its generous immigration policy, had a peak year in 2015 with more than 160,000 asylum applications. The country feared intolerable conditions. Reception facilities were overcrowded. Border controls and evictions changed that. The number of asylum applicants fell to about 30,000 in 2016.

Also read: It was ‘fun’ again in the VVD

However, the chance that the Netherlands will still decide to take strict measures, such as in Sweden or even an asylum ban, seems small. Van der Burg was rather skeptical about it. In June he pointed out the legal objections and the open borders of the Netherlands that make an asylum stop difficult to implement.

Another complication: the Netherlands cannot claim, like Sweden at the time, that it has to use the emergency brake as a result of previously generous policy. The numbers of asylum applications in the Netherlands are now much lower than those in Sweden in 2015. There are now almost 43,000 young people and adults in Dutch asylum seekers’ centres. In addition, there are almost 80,000 Ukrainians who did not have to apply for asylum status, but who do need housing.

Time-consuming route

Two other routes towards a rapid and sharp restriction of the asylum flow also seem to stand little chance in the Netherlands. There is a group of Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic) that explores the boundaries of European and refugee treaties and sometimes crosses them in order to let in as few asylum seekers as possible. For example, the three countries did not want to participate in European distribution plans for asylum seekers. They were convicted for this in 2020 by the European Court of Justice, without any sanctions from Brussels followed.

To avoid a red card from the European Court, and still do something about the asylum flow, the Netherlands has another – very time-consuming – option open: a so-called opt out requests in the European treaties. This concerns an exceptional position in order not to have to participate in, for example, new European asylum agreements. However, all EU Member States must agree to this. The chance of this happening is small because in such a case (even) more refugees will come their own way.

Denmark still got such a opt out in the Maastricht Treaty (1992). The possibilities for this were more favorable than now, because other EU Member States also wanted an exception provision at the time (the United Kingdom for monetary policy). By the opt out In the judicial field, Copenhagen was also not required to participate in certain asylum agreements, although it remained bound by human rights treaties.

A 2015 Danish referendum on the abolition of the opt out that the asylum policy could have been made more generous did not make it. The restrictive refugee policy remained. This spring, Denmark consulted with Rwanda about the expulsion of those who had exhausted all legal remedies to this African country. Copenhagen followed the United Kingdom, which made controversial agreements with Rwanda about the reception of illegal immigrants. The British left the EU in 2021, partly out of dissatisfaction with the influence of Brussels on their asylum policy.