The Provincial Council of Drenthe is completely fed up with municipalities in the rest of the country that refuse asylum seekers. The North keeps asking for help for the overflowing registration center in Ter Apel and municipalities keep looking away. “It must stop dawdling and looking away, action is needed.”
If a motion of serious dissatisfaction had officially existed, it would have been submitted today in the Provincial Council. In a motion by the PvdA, northern administrators were almost fully supported in their call to relieve Ter Apel. “Take responsibility with the northern municipalities to receive asylum seekers.”
As far as the Provincial Council is concerned, a letter with this message will be sent to all Dutch municipal councils, provinces, chairmen of the security regions and all factions in the Senate. “Groningen and Drenthe municipalities are taking a large part to accommodate refugees now that winter is approaching. The residents of Ter Apel and the surrounding area must also have a safe living and working environment,” it was stated.
“An absolute low point in the entire asylum discussion,” Mayor Eric van Oosterhout of Emmen calls the motion that was recently submitted in the House of Representatives to postpone the discussion of the dispersal law for the duration of the cabinet formation.
The law has already been adopted by the House of Representatives, has yet to be discussed in the Senate and should ensure a better distribution of asylum reception in the 340 municipalities of the Netherlands. With the dispersal law, municipalities may ultimately be forced to arrange reception for asylum seekers.
According to the mayor, a distinction must be made between the influx and reception of asylum seekers. “People are pouring in and the new government in the making says that we have to do something about it. But according to Van Oosterhout, it now concerns the people who are already in the Netherlands.
“In Ter Apel, 2,500 people are standing against the walls, it is only reasonable and fair that we as 340 municipalities stand up for that. And we need the government for that.”
Stadskanaal and Groningen stepped in two weeks ago with hundreds of additional emergency shelters. The municipality of Borger-Odoorn wants to take over the extra emergency shelter from Stadskanaal in February. A motion by Pieter de Groot (GroenLinks) and John Goeree (D66) was adopted in the municipal council last week. “We have actually been witnessing the increasingly untenable situation at the refugee shelter in Ter Apel for too long,” say De Groot and Goeree.
In the neighboring municipality of Stadskanaal, heated tents have been hastily built in which refugees, for whom there is no room in Ter Apel, can spend the night. During the day it is a hassle with people, because everyone has to return to Ter Apel for the remainder of the asylum procedure. If there is no room again in the evening, the refugees have to take the bus back to Stadskanaal for the overnight stay.
The Expo Hall in Assen may be used by the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) for three months longer. The agreement ran until January 1, but the hall can now be used as a waiting room at the registration center in Ter Apel until April 1.
The Expo Hall has been used as a waiting room since July and provides temporary shelter for up to five hundred asylum seekers. The COA has other locations in mind that could serve as a waiting room, but not all of these are ready yet. The furnishing of these locations will start in January and will take a number of weeks. As soon as these locations open to receive asylum seekers, the reception in the Expo Hall will be phased out. Assen also has a large asylum seekers’ center.
The United Nations refugee agency has called the situation in Ter Apel ‘downright worrying and a symptom of a bankrupt reception system’. The so-called UNHCR is responding to a report from the Justice and Security Inspectorate, which concludes that the situation at the registration center is unsafe and untenable.
Klijnsma wholeheartedly agrees. The Red Cross is raising the alarm about the health situation and the GGD warns that many North African men in the Ter Apeler asylum seeker center are on the heroin withdrawal drug methadone.
Klijnsma received a big compliment in the Provincial Council from Sam Pormes of the Lijst Pormes for her tireless efforts to look for housing and to point out to other municipalities that they must also do their share.
Klijnsma sits on behalf of all provinces at the so-called National Migration & Integration Steering Table. The government, provinces and municipalities work together in the areas of asylum and housing for status holders, among other things.