Brussels, March 9. The Belgian federal government reached an agreement on immigration on Thursday that will create more places for asylum seekers, many of whom have been living in dire situations for months due to lack of housing.
The agreement of the coalition that forms the executive, made up of Flemish and French-speaking socialists, liberals and ecologists, in addition to the Flemish Christian Democrats, however also provides for the reform of various aspects of migration policy.
According to the newspaper “Le Soir”, despite the agreement, Belgium is still far from being out of the refugee reception crisis.
In Brussels, according to the calculations of several NGOs, between 2,000 and 3,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in the heart of Europe in search of international protection are sleeping on the streets, but who, for the moment, are surviving in tents or on cardboard makeshift beds. .
The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has welcomed the agreement reached and called for the new places announced today to be made available “without delay”.
For its part, the Flemish association for the defense of asylum seekers, Vluchtelingenwerk Vlaanderen, has valued the additional reception places that it is planned to create, considering that “the promise remains vague and imprecise”.
“We still wonder if the government is capable of solving the reception crisis,” said the same association. ECE
Mo/mah