The Dutch cabinet has voted in favour of three draft pieces of legislation drawn up by immigration minister Marjolein Faber as part of her plans to bring in “the strictest asylum regime ever”.

The Council of State, the government’s most senior legal advisor, will now look at all three bills to make sure they hold water and can be implemented. That advice is due around mid February.

Faber told reporters on Friday she is fully confident that the council will accept her plans but said if the council is critical “my legal advisors and I will get to work”.

The plans, the minister said, will have an effect on refugee numbers. “This is what Dutch people want,” she said. “A fundamental change of policy to limit new arrivals and encourage returns.”

The first piece of legislation scraps permanent residency permits for refugees, reduces the primary refugee permit from five to three years, stops adult children from joining their parents in the Netherlands and makes it easier to declare people “undesirable aliens”.

The second bill will allow officials to differentiate between people who fled their home country because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion from people who fled from war or violence, including natural disasters.

The third law will make it a crime to refuse to cooperate with deportation plans.

The three laws replace the earlier wish to bring in emergency legislation which would have allowed ministers to bypass parliament but which was opposed by coalition party NSC.  

Criticism

Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right PVV, said earlier this week he would not accept any changes to Faber’s plans.

However, the Council of State and senior lawyers said earlier this month they had grave concerns about the minister’s plans.

In particular, the council said the new rules would create extra work for both the courts and the immigration service IND, who are already “overburdened and dealing with staff shortages,” the chair of the administrative justice panel wrote.

Some 50,000 refugees will have reached the Netherlands by the end of this year, well below government estimates.