EU Court obliges the Netherlands to review over 140,000 Ukrainian asylum applications
The Netherlands will have to return to examining over 140,000 Ukrainian asylum applications that were effectively frozen after the applicants were granted temporary protection. The reason is a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ruled that such applications cannot be automatically postponed until the end of the temporary protection regime.
In the Netherlands, for obtaining temporary protection, people who arrived from Ukraine after the start of the full-scale invasion were registered as asylum seekers at the same time. However, the examination of these applications was immediately suspended, since the people already received the right to residence, work, medical care and other guarantees under the European Temporary Protection Directive. As a result, more than 140,000 such cases accumulated in the immigration service IND.
On October 1, the Court of Justice ruled that having temporary protection does not deprive a person of the right to simultaneously seek international protection. Both procedures can run in parallel and independently of each other, and the deadlines set by law for processing asylum applications continue to apply. A general and automatic suspension of such cases until the end of temporary protection is contrary to EU law.
However, the ruling does not mean that more than 140,000 Ukrainians will automatically receive refugee status or another form of international protection. IND must examine each application and make an individual decision. Even a refusal to grant asylum does not by itself terminate the current temporary protection of the applicant.
The court left states some room for organizing their work. Processing times may be extended for objective reasons, in particular if the migration system receives such a large number of applications at the same time that it is physically unable to process them within the normal deadlines. However, using the very fact of temporary protection as a ground for automatically postponing all cases is not allowed.
The Dutch Minister for Asylum and Migration acknowledged that the ruling will create additional pressure on the system. According to him, the authorities deliberately did not examine the applications of Ukrainians for a long time precisely because of their large number and because they had temporary protection.
At the same time, Amsterdam does not plan to simultaneously start processing all the accumulated cases. The government wants to first work on new applications, in parallel reduce the existing queue of more than 50,000 other applicants, and process the Ukrainian cases later and probably in stages. Migration law experts suggest that priority might be given to specific groups, for example families.
The Dutch approach differed from the practice of many other EU countries: obtaining temporary protection there did not require automatically filing a separate asylum application. It is precisely because of the peculiarities of the Dutch system that such a large backlog of unexamined applications has now arisen.
The temporary protection regime for people who left Ukraine because of the war is currently extended in the European Union until March 2028. It remains separate from the procedure for obtaining refugee status or other international protection.
The Court of Justice’s ruling must now be applied in a specific case by the Council of State of the Netherlands — the highest administrative judicial body of the country. After that, it should become clearer on what schedule IND will process the accumulated Ukrainian applications.
Based on materials from: Court of Justice of the European Union, NOS, DutchNews
