Courts reverse Verdonk in 75pc of cases

4 August 2006

AMSTERDAM — Judges have repeatedly rejected decisions taken by the Immigration and Naturalisation (IND) so far this year and raised question marks about how the service reaches these decisions.

The IND often bases decisions to refuse entry to asylum seekers on shaky ground, newspaper ‘AD’ said on Friday. Accounts given by applications are often not investigated, decisions are in conflict with the law or the arguments used by the IND cut no ice.

The newspaper based its report on a study of 120 judgements delivered by immigration judges between 1 February and mid July. The information about the cases comes from a central body that collects data from all courts. It is not known how many judgements were made in immigration cases during this period.

AD said the judges struck down the IND’s decisions in three quarters of the 120 cases examined. The IND’s own figures suggest it lost 21 percent of cases in the first six months of the year.

In some cases the judges raised question marks about how the IND officials reached their decisions. Amsterdam judge HJM Baldinger recently spoke out about her serious concerns about the manner the IND conducts itself.

She said it was troubling that the IND frequently rejects solid evidence from aliens as unreliable. However, the Council of State (Raad van State), which has the last word in asylum cases, almost always sides with the government, AD said. The Council only looks at whether the law was applied correctly.

Once they lose in the Raad van State, the only avenue left to applicants is the European Court of Human Rights. Verdonk’s officials have been criticised there for ignoring evidence provided by aliens.

Meanwhile, a one-year-old child has been ordered by the IND to leave the Netherlands ‘on its own initiative’ by the end of August. The case was first reported in the newspaper ‘Limburgs Dagblad’ on 29 July, and was subsequently reposted on internet discussion forums.

The father is a Dutch citizen from a Moroccan background and the mother is a legal resident in the Netherlands. They are not married and the father didn’t officially acknowledge the unborn child because an out-of-wedlock baby is a sensitive matter in the Moroccan community. He tried to register the child as his later on but the damage has been done. The child has neither a Dutch nor Moroccan passport and is not listed on his parents’ passports.

The matter came to a head when the father applied for a travel document to bring his son on a visit to Morocco. This could not be issued as the child doesn’t have a passport. A lawyer was drafted in and he applied for a residence permit to end the child’s stateless status.

The IND turned this down and ordered the baby to leave the country. Verdonk’s officials argued this was not an infringement of the child’s right to a family life.

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Subject: Dutch news