State Secretary Nicole de Moor. — © EPA-EFE
Last year, Belgium was able to transfer 1,241 asylum seekers to another Member State of the European Union. State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor (CD&V) reported this on Monday. The government wants to set up more specific centers to speed up these transfers.
The Dublin rules stipulate that the EU member state where a person first applies for asylum is responsible for handling the asylum procedure. In principle, the Member States must take back these asylum seekers from each other, but in practice this does not always go smoothly.
However, the number of transfers through Belgium has again shown an upward trend since the end of the corona pandemic: from 831 in 2022 to 1,241 transfers in 2023, the highest number since the peak of 2016, with 1,479 transfers. Most transfers are to Austria, Germany and France.
32 days
Since August 2022, Belgium has had a center in Zaventem that was established to improve returns within the framework of the Dublin rules. There the procedure is completed in an average of 32 days, 28 percent faster than outside the center. And the faster the procedure, the greater the chance that the responsible Member State will cooperate.
According to De Moor, the Council of Ministers agreed on Friday to establish more specific Dublin centers in the future. That should make it possible to further increase returns. In 2022, 2,168 people were eligible for such an accelerated procedure, in 2023 this was 4,842.
Monthly asylum center
“I do not think it is sustainable that asylum seekers who have a procedure underway in other European countries start another procedure in Belgium,” De Moor said in a statement. “That puts enormous pressure on our reception network. Every month it is about the size of a small asylum center.”