A rolling 24-hour fine imposed by a Dutch court on the national refugee settlement agency for every night that the Netherlands’ main asylum reception centre in the north of the country is overcrowded has reached a total of €1 million, the agency has revealed.
In a legal action taken by the municipality of Westerwolde, where Ter Apel reception centre is located, judges ruled in January that the agency, the COA, should face a fine of €15,000 for every night that the centre exceeds its maximum limit of 2,000 residents.
The municipality sought a higher fine of €25,000 a night on the grounds that the limit, set as a safety precaution in 2010, had been honoured more often in the breach, especially in August 2022 when hundreds of arrivals were forced to sleep in the open for weeks.
At the height of that summer, the medical charity Medicines Sans Frontiers was called to support the centre after a three-month-old baby died in an overcrowded sports hall serving as an overflow for the main facility – where conditions were described by the doctors as “inhuman”.
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Multiple agencies also warned that staff were untrained to deal with the crisis, that buildings did not comply with fire safety standards, that the number of violent incidents was increasing – and that unaccompanied children were at risk and frequently unmonitored.
Such was the level of concern, bordering on disbelief, that the king’s commissioner for the province of Groningen, together with the mayors of nine towns, wrote to caretaker justice minister Dilan Yesilgoz, describing the chaos as “unacceptable”.
The letter, which rapidly found its way into the public domain, declared: “We find it utterly incomprehensible that this can happen in our country.”
Ms Yesilgoz has since replaced Mark Rutte as leader of the centre-right VVD and is currently involved in long-running coalition talks with three other right-leaning parties, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; the farmers’ party, BBB; and Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract.
Immigration, which brought down Mr Rutte last year, is still among the most contentious issues in the negotiations, along with the concerns over how to cut CO2 emissions.
Most difficult to tackle is the fact that of the 342 local authorities, one-third have not allocated any accommodation, permanent or temporary, for refugees over the past 12 years.
The outgoing government had threatened to legislate to force authorities to comply. However, what happens now depends on the next administration.
The two facilitators leading the coalition talks are due to report to parliament next Wednesday – with Frans Timmermans of Labour-GreenLeft warning that if there’s no deal by June 1st, the parties of the left should be given clearance to attempt an alternative.
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