As Ireland prepares to toughen asylum policy, the Netherlands is reconsidering the ideas we may imitate, writes Jamie Smythin Amsterdam
Massaneh Bayo believes he has committed no crime, but the 38-year old asylum seeker is getting used to prison. Since arriving in Amsterdam in 2004, from Gambia, he has spent more than a year locked up in detention centres and jails. Released two weeks ago by the authorities with no legal papers to enable him to work or get social welfare, he now spends his days on the streets and nights in homeless shelters.
"It's as if they want to force you to commit crimes just to eat," he says. "We are nobodies here. They put us in prison, then release us and then put us back inside again."
Bayo could be detained again at any time for not having any residency papers.
His experience is not unique or a bureaucratic mix-up. It is government policy. Over the past decade the Netherlands, well-known for its tolerance of soft drugs and prostitution, has built up one of the toughest asylum systems in Europe.
It has pioneered 48-hour fast-track processing of asylum requests, detention for asylum applicants and the withdrawal of welfare and housing benefits after negative asylum decisions. Due to a lack of space at specialised detention centres it locks up asylum seekers on boats and in normal prisons, and has recently required successful applicants to pass language and culture tests to obtain Dutch citizenship.
Civil liberties groups say the Aliens Act 2000, which reformed the Dutch asylum system, violates refugee and asylum rights. Yet politicians in Europe, increasingly sensitive to immigration issues, have flocked to The Hague to draw ideas from a model that has dramatically cut the number of asylum requests in recent years. Ireland is no exception. Minister for Justice Michael McDowell will this month unveil plans for detention centres and a fast-track application process, modelled on the hardline Dutch and British systems. The theory is that tough policies mean fewer bogus asylum seekers.
"The Netherlands was seen as a soft touch [ before 2001]. Go to the Netherlands, you'll get a house, you'll get social benefits, all the people speak English. It's the same as Britain, except you have to swim there," says Gert Versluis, deputy director general of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service. "But 80 per cent of cases were economic migrants, not refugees. Asylum was a way to get into Europe with no visa."
The huge volume of asylum requests in the 1990s meant there was a large backlog of cases and long delays for appeals. But five years after the Aliens Act was passed in 2001, there are no backlogs and asylum cases are dealt with swiftly, he says.
Statistics back him up. Just 9,800 people applied for asylum in the Netherlands in 2004, compared to 20,936 requests in the first nine months of 2001. Even taking into account a lower number of world conflicts that lead refugees to flee their homes, the scale of the fall suggests that word has spread: the Netherlands is no "soft touch". But civil liberties groups and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have expressed grave concerns that the drive for efficiency and popular fears over immigration have led to policies that infringe the human rights of vulnerable people.
In 2003 Human Rights Watch published a report based on a three-month investigation in the Netherlands, which stated that the fast-track decision-making process was failing genuine asylum seekers. Children's rights were also being abused, with children aged as young as six being interviewed in the asylum process, it said.
In the wake of the report, the Dutch government stopped the interviewing of children below the age of eight, but rejected criticism of the 48-hour process.
This fast-track system, which is the centrepiece of Dutch asylum policy, relies on the creation of special reception centres where immigration officials assess, using two short interviews, whether an asylum claim can be rejected as bogus. Due to the short timeframes involved, this process was initially supposed to be used only for asylum seekers with "wafer-thin stories". Complex cases would continue to be dealt with under a normal asylum process, which gives six months for consideration. But the fast-track procedure has quickly become the main decision-making process on asylum requests, accounting for almost 50 per cent of asylum rejections in 2005.
"I think genuine asylum seekers were rejected during the first period after the Aliens Act," says Stefan Kok, policy officer at the Refugee Council, a Dutch organisation that advises asylum seekers. "Most traumatised refugees find it difficult to open up and tell their story in a short time. These people became victims of the system."
The courts have also offered little respite, says Mr Kok, who alleges that the highest Dutch court (the Council of State) has failed asylum seekers by refusing to question fast-track decisions made by the state immigration service.
THE ECHR IN Strasbourg has highlighted several cases in which the Dutch authorities failed people who claimed asylum. Last month it ruled that a decision to expel a Somali national, Abdirizaq Salah Sheekh, was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, because he faced possible torture if sent back to Somalia. In 2005 it intervened to prevent the expulsion of an Eritrean soldier, who was detained in an underground cell for five months by his commanders before escaping to claim asylum.
Amnesty International has strongly criticised the Dutch detention policy, which keeps certain groups of asylum seekers locked up while their claims are processed. Every day an average of 1,200 asylum seekers are locked up, many in prisons that house ordinary criminals. Concerns over the policy have heightened in the Netherlands since 11 failed asylum seekers were burnt to death in a fire at a temporary detention centre at Schiphol Airport in October 2005. There have also been journalistic investigations into the poor conditions at the centres.
"The worst detention centres are the boats in Rotterdam, where asylum seekers are kept in cells of four to six people," says lawyer Loes Vellenga. "There is no opportunity for recreation, just one hour a day to walk in a cage structure on the quay, like a zoo. People are there for months."
Bayo, the asylum seeker from Gambia who spent more than a year in detention centres and prisons, says conditions are terrible. "People tried to commit suicide while I was there. They get very depressed and hopeless . . . It is really no life."
Under Dutch law the detention period is limitless, although courts must consider the human rights of a person who is held for more than six months if they are unable to deport them. In Bayo's case, this led to his release from detention two weeks ago. But with no social welfare available under Dutch law, his situation, arguably, has not improved.
Ironically, just as Ireland prepares to introduce its own tough asylum policy, the Netherlands is preparing to review its own system. Last week the new government said it would grant an amnesty to 26,000 asylum seekers who submitted applications before 2001. It is also considering whether to change the 48-hour fast-track process, according to Gert Versluis. But there will be no return to old policies, he insists, because the Aliens Act has succeeded. Human rights groups and Bayo hope that he is proved wrong.