The Secretary of State will also announce this message later this week in Luxembourg, where European ministers and state secretaries of Justice and/or Home Affairs meet to discuss European asylum and migration policy. Van der Burg will also insist on compliance with the Dublin Regulation for asylum applications. This stipulates that an asylum application must in principle be submitted in the first country where an asylum seeker enters Europe.
“I believe that a good, just and fair asylum policy can only work if agreements are kept. It is not fair that other countries do not do this,” said Van der Burg in the parliamentary debate in preparation for the meeting in Luxembourg. More than a third of the asylum seekers who now reside in an asylum seekers center do not belong there according to the ‘Dublin rules’, but have to go through the asylum procedure in another country, the state secretary said. If those approximately 3600 people had not ended up in Dutch asylum seekers’ centers, an important capacity problem would have been solved, according to him.
Good screening and registration are also indispensable in a fair European asylum policy, says Van der Burg. As long as that is not properly arranged, the Netherlands will not take over asylum seekers from other countries, he emphasizes. “There’s nothing to talk about until then.”
The House is divided on the reception of asylum seekers. Coalition party VVD, among others, calls the current asylum influx untenable and too much for the Netherlands. Member of parliament Ruben Brekelmans (VVD) believes that the State Secretary should do much more to reduce the influx and increase the return of asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal remedies. JA21 and the SGP also believe that more work should be done on deporting those who have exhausted all legal remedies. Various parties, such as the PvdA and the SP, find the situation in Ter Apel extremely worrying. A ‘mess’, as SP MP Jasper van Dijk put it.