How feasible are the asylum measures announced by the new Dutch cabinet?
The new Dutch cabinet aims to reduce the number of asylum seeks coming to the Netherlands by introducing a number of asylum policy measures. Dr Mark Klaassen, Assistant Professor of Immigration Law, discusses this in Dutch daily newspaper 'de Telegraaf'.
The agreement involves revoking the Dutch Dispersal Act, limiting the right to family reunification and declaring a crisis that would render certain legal provisions inapplicable. The goal of the four main political parties is for the Netherlands to ‘join the category of Member States with the strictest admission rules in the EU’, reports de Telegraaf.
Klaassen believes that the plans will be difficult to impossible to implement and wonders ‘whose fault it will be if the policy plans fail’. The other plan doesn’t work either; that is, not processing asylum applications for a period of two crisis years, as EU law doesn’t provide for this situation and takes precedence over national law.
More information
Read the full article in de Telegraaf (in Dutch, €)
Photo at top: Lars Dunker through Unsplash