COA approached municipalities to convert asylum centers into emergency shelters

The Central Office for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has approached the municipalities and asked whether they would be willing to convert asylum seekers' centers into emergency reception shelters so that more people can be accommodated. This was confirmed by a COA spokesperson according to reports from AD.It was said to have been about "exploring possible possibilities" a few weeks ago and has not become a concrete plan.

Emergency shelters are temporary locations such as event halls that are intended to accommodate asylum seekers who cannot be accommodated in regular centers. There are fewer facilities, the COA writes on its website. "Residents often have less privacy, no opportunity to cook for themselves and less meaningful daytime activities." At the moment there are 89 regular asylum seekers' centers (azcs), 193 emergency shelters and six regular azcs that have been expanded with emergency shelter.

It is not known which municipalities were approached exactly. The municipality of Utrecht is one of them, a spokesperson says. "We did indeed also receive this question for one of our locations, whether we wanted to explore that possibility. We immediately indicated that that was absolutely not an option. The shelter would become far too full and the conditions would therefore be inhumane." The permit would also not allow for the adjustment. The COA's request was therefore "scrapped immediately".

Doetinchem mayor Mark Boumans is also aware of the idea of ​​turning regular asylum centers into emergency shelters. As a director of the Association of Dutch Municipalities, he is involved in asylum reception. Boumans calls the idea "rather opportunistic and not very brilliant for all sorts of reasons". According to Boumans, the distribution law that regulates the distribution of asylum seekers across the Netherlands is already an "excellent instrument". However, the government wants to withdraw that law.

In the end, the plans were not implemented because COA would have violated agreements previously made with the Dutch municipalities about how many asylum seekers they would have to accept in total. "We would then have exceeded the numbers in the administrative agreement in municipalities," a spokesperson told AD.