The Inspectorate sees the complexity of asylum applications increasing. Due to a shortage of experienced staff, it is more often up to new employees to assess these applications. According to the Inspectorate, they do not have enough time to do this, for example in the preparation of interviews with asylum applicants. Employees therefore skip breaks and work through the evening.
Because a thorough investigation is necessary, the general asylum procedure is often converted into an extended procedure. The result is an extra waiting time for the asylum applicant, which can run up to several months.
In addition, the Inspectorate emphasizes the importance of quality checks. As long as these are carried out properly, it can be determined afterwards whether employees have made an objective judgment. Nevertheless, random quality measurements were suspended for several months last year, so that it was no longer checked whether asylum applications had been processed correctly or not. These will be carried out in the second half of 2021, says a spokesperson for the inspectorate.
The fact that the quality checks no longer took place was due to a lack of experienced staff. Experienced employees carry out the quality measurements, but were now deployed in the assessment of asylum applications. They also had to step in to guide newly hired staff.
Time for action
According to the researchers, it is time for the ministry to take action to ensure “the availability of sufficient capacity and (financial) resources”. In turn, the IND must ensure that employees are given the opportunity to collect sufficient information about asylum applicants in order to arrive at a ‘well-founded judgement’.
The asylum chain in the Netherlands has been plagued by problems for some time. At the beginning of 2020, for example, more than 15,000 asylum applications had not been processed within the statutory period. This led to tens of millions in penalties that the state had to pay. The previous cabinet ended the penalty payments, but a judge ruled last month that it should remain possible for a judge to impose a penalty. Now there is no “strong financial incentive” to enforce a judgment in an asylum case, the court finds.