By Hanna van Leent
Staff Writer
Where are you from? If you are not from The Netherlands, then there is a chance that your fellow countrymen, -women and children are being held in custody in the Netherlands without having committed any crime – apart from the fact that their request of asylum has been turned down.
The Dutch state decides per case whether the risk of fleeing and being in The Netherlands illegally is too high. The consequence is that asylum seekers are being thrown into an institution that has the characteristics of a prison.
Last week, State Secretary for Security and Justice Fred Teeuwen (VVD, Liberal Right wing) has announced that the treatment of refused asylum seekers has to become more humane. The treatment of these people is, to say it mildly, very poor. They do not actually go to a prison, but to a deportation center, which basically means that for up to a month, the asylum seekers wait until being deported to the country from whence they came. They have to spend almost all their time there in cells and there are no activities, furthermore, medical care for these people is kept to a minimum.
These are just a few of the examples of the living conditions of these people. On January 17, 2013, an asylum seeker committed suicide in his cell in Rotterdam. He hanged himself after being denied a permit to stay. His name was Aleksandr Dolmatov and he was a political refugee. Amnesty International claims that this is just the tip of the ice berg: 55 people tried to commit suicide in 2011 and the psychological aid provided for these people to prepare them for their return is poor.
These recent happenings have caused a fierce debate in the Dutch parliament. A debate on April 18, 2013, of more than 12 hours, failed to approve what would be most suitably translated as a motion of distrust. Had it been approved, it could have meant the State Secretary Fred Teeuven would have had to leave parliament. The question is why all these issues come up only now after the suicide: hunger strikes, reports of Amnesty International and current health research have all been presented before.
The State Secretary, who almost received the motion of distrust, revealed his plans to make this last stage of refused asylum seekers more humane. He opted for less people in these prisons, more activities, milder conditions and more medical care. Currently, there are 2,000 people in the prisons, but he wants to gradually lessen that number to 933 by 2016.
Teeuven also wants to shorten the stay of the asylum seekers and only put children under such a regime when their parents have tried to flee from the asylum camp to live illegally in The Netherlands. It is only now, after the parliament made matters urgent, that he actually took action – although the public had already known about many of these abuses. It took him six months after the debate for him to bring forward a change in the legislation and in the meantime, people have suffered from traumas due to the strict treatment while in the centers.
These plans are promising; however, one cannot help but wonder why all these complaints and even a couple of suicides had to occur before people started to even think about a change in the procedures. It remains the question whether the children who are put in these deportation centers will actually go to school until the final day of their stay in the Netherlands. I keep wondering, why, under the regime of the former minister Rita Verdonk of the former department “Foreigners’ Matters and Integration”, such totalitarian conditions could have existed. I hope action will be taken so that the “undesirables” of the Netherlands will not be forced to rot in a cell for several months until being forced out of the country.
Hanna van Leent, class of 2015, is a History major from Rodenrijs, the Netherlands.
