The Dutch Government, which includes the radical right, announced this Wednesday that it is exploring the possibility of deport and house asylum seekers in Uganda coming from African countries who have exhausted all legal remedies to achieve legal residence in the Netherlands, in exchange for financial compensation for Kampala.
The Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, the far-right Reinette Klever, announced, during a working visit to Uganda, that her colleague, the Minister of Migration and Asylum, Marjolein Faber, will develop this idea and announced that The Ugandan Government is not against the approach and that you will be offered financial compensation in exchange.
The idea is to deport and house in Uganda asylum seekers who, coming from African countries, have already been rejected in the Netherlands after resort to all possible legal avenuesand the objective is that, from Kampala, they are returned to their country of origin.
“What we ultimately want is to reduce migration. For the Government, it is important that those who have exhausted their legal remedies return to their country of origin. And that is where the situation sometimes stagnates,” said Minister Klever, who assured that the Netherlands has “a long relationship with Uganda and this is a hospitable country,” so Faber “will continue to explore the possibilities.”
Poverty and homophobia
According to data shared by the Dutch Foreign Ministry itself, Uganda hosts more than 1.5 million refugeesmostly in areas near South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where many refugees come from.
Conditions in camps for Ugandan asylum seekers They are “bad”Foreign Affairs admits, and “there is not always enough food and water” for the people who take refuge there.
In addition, it warns that LGTBI people who want to travel to Uganda “could face severe punishments there, and even the death penalty.”
It is not clear whether the Dutch government’s plan, in which Geert Wilders’ radical right has the majority in a four-party coalition, wants deported asylum seekers are also refugees in those same camps.
Wilders has hailed the plan to investigate this idea as “genius” because it will mean “fewer asylum seekers, and more Netherlands”, wrote.
Meanwhile, Diederik Boomsma, deputy of the Christian Democratic party NSC (another government partner), said he was “in principle positive” about the idea of ​​what are known as return centers in countries outside the European Union (EU) and recalled that in the Uganda region there are many countries that do not collaborate with the returns of their citizens.
However, he conditioned his party’s support on respecting the fundamental human rights of asylum seekers, which “people should be treated well”, Although he admitted that Uganda does not have a good reputation in that regard, which is “worrying”, but good agreements can be made with Kampala on this, he assured.
Unviable for the opposition
The other two partners have not yet made clear their position on this plan. The farmers’ party, BBB, is the minority partner and has often sided with Wilders’ PVV on immigration issues, while the VVD liberals say they will only comment when the government presents a proposal to Parliament.
The opposition has been totally critical of this idea. From the green party GroenLinks, Jesse Klaver considered this “the umpteenth diversionary maneuver” of the Dutch cabinet, which, he noted, shows that “it is not achieving anything, they are not building houses, they are not managing to keep the hospitals open,” nor solve the country’s other problems, he lamented.
He urged the two far-right ministers to “make agreements” with the countries of origin of the citizens, which “It’s very complicated, but it is making real policies.”
The progressives of D66 describe the plan as “symbolic politics” and consider that it is “totally unviable and poorly thought out”, recalling that other countries, such as Denmark and the United Kingdom, have already tried it and have managed to send “zero people to Africa.”
This announcement from the Netherlands comes a day after the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed to EU leaders to explore the idea of ​​developing “return centers” of illegal migrants outside the EU, since it considers that “lessons can be drawn” from the experience of the agreement between Italy and Albania.
