Are the rights of the child being respected? That’s the crucial question that the staff of Defence for Children’s legal helpdesk always ask. Sadly, with increasing regularity the answer is ‘no’. Despite this, these lawyers work tirelessly to achieve justice. We talked to legal advisor Martin Vegter and youth ambassador Ruzanna from Defence for Children Netherlands about this.

Less and less space

“I don’t have my own room. It’s so difficult to concentrate with my parents and my three brothers all around me. How can I do my homework like this?” Martin Vegter has been working at Defence for Children Netherlands as a legal advisor on the Migration helpdesk for more than eleven years. But phone calls like this from children still get to him. “The situation has only got worse in recent years. Asylum seekers’ centers have grown in scale and the people living there have less and less space. At family centers for people who have had their asylum applications refused and have no further right to appeal, families sometimes live in crowded conditions for years.”

Growing up in an asylum
seekers’ center

Ruzanna (24) lived in many different asylum seekers’ centers. When she was thirteen, she and her mother fled from Russia to the Netherlands. “I often had to move. That made me sad, anxious and distrustful. I felt incomplete, as if I wasn’t allowed to be here, even though at the same time I was just going to school and trying to join in with my classmates. During that period, Defence for Children Netherlands really helped me, with the legal side, but also emotionally. I could talk to them and I felt understood and protected. When I turned 18 and stopped being entitled to education, they supported me as well. They wrote a letter to the college and within a few weeks they had organized everything, from my registration to the tuition fees.”

Children who grew up here

Martin receives queries not just from lawyers and care workers, but also directly from people living in family centers or asylum seekers’ centers themselves. He mainly deals with legal issues, for example when a family is threatened with deportation. “Children living in family centers have nightmares about the ‘vans’ that pick people up to be deported. Recently, a family with four children was taken in one of these vans to the detention center in Zeist, the last stop before being deported. They had been living in the Netherlands for seven years and the children had grown up here.”

Just in time

Sometimes Martin only has a few days to work with the family’s lawyer to prevent the deportation. “First, I need to get all the facts straight. I get the legal papers from the lawyer and discuss the strategy. Dealing with the family with four children was particularly hectic. On the day when they were scheduled to be deported, the judge decided to have a hearing. The Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service, the IND, said the decision needed to be issued before the plane departed, as otherwise they would no longer be able to prevent the deportation. The flight was due to leave just after six in the evening. In the end, the decision came around four o’clock, just in time to stop the deportation.”

For Martin, it’s incomprehensible that children who have lived here nearly all their lives should be deported: “Deporting children after they’ve been in the Netherlands for a really long time is harmful to their development. Several scientific studies have shown this. Moreover, the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that countries that have signed this convention are required to do everything they can to protect children’s development. But forcibly sending children back to a country they hardly know, when you know this is bad for their development, is exactly the opposite.”

Last day in the Netherlands

For seven years, Ruzanna lived in a state of uncertainty, scared that she too would be taken to the detention center. “When someone wasn’t at school, I immediately knew what had happened that morning. They always wake you up early and you have no choice but to go. I heard that, once that van arrives, you only have ten minutes to get your things together. Every day you ask yourself: is this my last day in the Netherlands?”

When she was twenty, she and her mother heard that the uncertainty was over – finally, they were getting a residence permit. “At first, I couldn’t believe it. I must have read the letter giving us the news at least six times.” Now she’s a youth ambassador for Defence for Children Netherlands. “I want to make a difference for children living in difficult circumstances. No child should ever be allowed to wake up in fear. When you end up in another country, there’s so much you have to deal with. Adults often think that children aren’t aware of anything, but they actually pick up a lot of what’s going on.”

No way out

In the past, the law sometimes offered a way out, as in the case of Ruzanna, who was granted a residence permit in the end. But that option no longer exists for these children. Martin explains: “Children put down roots in the Netherlands due to the procedures taking too long and the IND appealing against almost every court decision that’s in a child’s favor. The government does everything it can to prevent parents gaining better rights to residence through their children.”

“That’s why they hold children accountable for their parents’ actions and refuse to grant residence to the children. Even in the most distressing cases, for example where there are medical problems. The child’s interests aren’t taken into consideration in the decisions. When I think of all those children who’ve been living here for years, sometimes even 15 years… it’s just heartbreaking.”

The work of Defence for Children

Defence for Children Netherlands has been working for forty years to protect and promote children’s rights, both nationally and internationally. The organization works to defend children in vulnerable situations, with a focus on migration, youth care and child abuse. Besides offering direct assistance through their children’s rights helpdesk, which provides legal support for children and their families, they also lobby politicians in The Hague for better legislation and policy. The Migration children’s rights helpdesk is partly funded by financial support from Adessium Foundation.