The IND immigration service can refuse to give residency permits to Syrian asylum seekers who have returned to their home country for a visit but must still take their individual situation into account, the Council of State said on Wednesday.

The country’s highest administrative court was ruling in two separate cases. One case was brought by a woman, 41, who had returned to Syria from the Netherlands to look after her sick mother and ended up staying there longer for a variety of reasons.

Two years later she returned to the Netherlands and made a new application for asylum which was rejected.

The second case concerned a 31-year-old woman who left Syria in 2013, when the civil war started and moved to Egypt to be with her now ex-husband. In the intervening period, she travelled to Syria at least six times for periods of between one and three months, staying with her parents in an area controlled by Assad.

In 2021 she left and came to the Netherlands where she applied for asylum and was turned down. The IND said the frequent travel to Syria in the intervening period showed the woman was not in any danger and did not need protection.

The Council of State said that in Dutch asylum law, the minister is required to assume Syrian nationals face a real risk of harm if they go back. However, if a Syrian has returned to Syria without problems, their application for asylum should be assessed in the usual way, which means the minister must “assess whether that person faces a real risk of serious harm”.

In the first case, the minister must better justify why past events mean that she would not face a real risk of serious harm if she went to Syria again, the court said. It also ordered the ministry to pay costs.

In the second case the court ruled that the minister had provided sufficient reasoning why the women did not run a real risk of serious harm, given that she had been back six times and spent time without security problems in an area controlled by the Syrian regime.

New arrivals

Fewer refugees and family members came to the Netherlands in the second quarter of this year, according to the most recent figures from the IND immigration service.

In total, 7,700 people made their first application for refugee status between April and June, down 14% on the first quarter. In particular, there was a 43% plunge in the number of applications from Iraqi nationals.

At the same time, some 2,780 close relatives came to join family members who had been given refugee status, down 310 the first quarter. There was a notable drop in applications from Syrians, even though they still account for 70% of relatives arriving in the Netherlands.