Lawyers Françoise Landerloo and Wouter Smeets are going to sue the Dutch State for human smuggling. According to them, the government of our country is guilty of this by participating in the European redistribution policy for refugees. The criminal lawyers have a criminal complaint in preparation, they tell De Telegraaf.
The immediate reason for the step that the two Maastricht lawyers will take is the mandatory refugee redistribution key recently adopted by the Justice and Home Affairs Council of the European Union. This is because Italy and Greece could no longer cope with the large influx of refugees.
That redistribution key involves registering refugees first and then distributing them, proportionately. Our country will "take in" about 7,000 refugees over the next two years. The Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that asylum applications must be processed in the country of entry, will not apply with respect to these individuals.
For each "adopted refugee," 6,000 euros will be paid. "Direct consequence is that although refugees are registered in the country of entry, mostly Italy or Greece. But then, without having a residence status, they are brought to our country by or because of the Dutch government in order to be able to apply for asylum here at a certain place," Smeets and Landerloo explain.
"In fact, the Dutch government will then do nothing other than what other people are suspected of doing: transporting refugees from location A to location B within Europe. If that is human smuggling, then the Dutch government also becomes a human smuggler. The big question is: is this allowed?" the lawyer duo continued.
"The ongoing thought among citizens is that a criminal offense like human smuggling must involve payment by refugees to the alleged smugglers. That is not true at all and sits something else: Payment is merely a punitive offence and thus not an explicit condition for human smuggling."
"Through this process, we want to test whether the Dutch government is allowed to redistribute refugees without knowing in advance whether these people will receive a residence permit. It is therefore purely a legal issue and not a political statement. This issue is completely separate from the question of whether and how many refugees the Netherlands should receive," Landerloo emphasized.
Landerloo and Smeets often serve as lawyers in human trafficking and smuggling cases. Geert Jan Knoops, professor of international criminal law, says he finds this issue "an interesting one." "It is good that clarity is coming about this. Very special that people want to expose this in this way. It will then have to be proven that the entry of the refugees into the Netherlands was unlawful."
