Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Friday (26 August) mentioned he was “ashamed” of issues on the nation’s centre for processing asylum requests as humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) despatched in a staff to help with migrants’ medical wants.
His authorities introduced a sequence of measures supposed to deal with the issues on the Ter Apel centre, the place a whole bunch of asylum seekers have been sleeping tough in current weeks.
However Rutte mentioned at a information convention the issues had been “not one thing that may be solved in just a few weeks or months”.
It was the primary time that MSF, also called Docs With out Borders and largely lively in poor creating nations, has labored within the Netherlands, a rich European Union state, the MSF emergency coordinator on the shelter mentioned.
“The asylum-seekers right here dwell in dismal, primitive circumstances,” Monique Nagelkerke mentioned.
Rutte mentioned a 2015 choice to scale back asylum capability and a nationwide housing scarcity had been aggravating the issue.
“I feel that everybody within the Netherlands thinks it’s horrible that MSF feels obliged to leap in at Ter Apel,” he instructed reporters.
His cupboard on Friday introduced measures to satisfy a ten September deadline to have new arrivals on the centre sheltered, together with enlisting the assistance of the Defence Ministry to open a second registration location on a navy base.
It additionally mentioned it could take non permanent measures to limit the “influx” of migrants, together with halting accepting 1,000 asylum seekers yearly as agreed below a 2016 European Union take care of Turkey. It can additionally halt visas for relations of people that would not have housing within the Netherlands.
The arrival of MSF adopted the dying of a 3-month-old child on the Ter Apel shelter this week, which drew worldwide concern.
The child died of unknown causes in a sports activities gymnasium getting used as a makeshift shelter for newcomers on the shelter with nowhere else to sleep, in response to Leon Veldt, spokesman for the Dutch Central Company for the Reception of Asylum Seekers.
“We’re caught, we don’t know the place to go,” mentioned Motaz Mohammed, 25, who got here from Yemen and has been sleeping exterior the centre for 11 days, by means of each a heat-wave and thunderstorms.
“Nobody desires to speak to us, solely the guards, and the guards inform us: ‘Sorry, wait’.”
