Neither the asylum ministry nor the IND immigration service can stop the deportation of an 11-year-old boy who was born in the Netherlands to Armenia, broadcaster NOS said on Friday.

Mikael, who is about to start secondary school in Amsterdam, had made a last-ditch application for residency under a regulation set up when the amnesty for well-rooted child refugees was closed down in 2019.

He won his case in court in 2021 but the justice ministry pressed ahead with its deportation plans, and now the Council of State has ruled in the ministry’s favour, 2.5 years after it first heard the case.

The highest Dutch administrative court said on Wednesday Mikael and his mother could be deported, even though the boy has never been in Armenia.

In particular, the fact that he and his mother were “out of sight of the authorities” for more than three months, means they are not covered by exceptions to the new rules, the Council of State said. The family denies this is the case.

The regulations introduced in 2019 remove the right of appeal to the minister and states that only the head of the IND has the right of discretion and can allow him to stay.

The IND, meanwhile, told NOS it can only act when the child has made a first application for residency and that is not the case with Mikael.

Nevertheless, a petition calling on asylum minister Marjolein Faber to allow the boy to stay has now been signed over 50,000 times.

Mikael and his mother live in a refugee centre in Zuidoost district and she has been in the country since 2010. “The IND can as well send me to Ghana,” Mikael told the Parool in June. “I know as much about that country as I do Armenia.”