The European Court of Human Rights issued two decisions over family reunification involving the Netherlands on Tuesday, siding with Dutch courts in one case but rejecting the conclusion in another.

The pair of cases involved requests from Dutch citizens who had family members who were not Dutch and who wanted to move to the Netherlands.

In 2015 Usha Kumari, an Indian national, applied to join her son who lives in the Netherlands and is a Dutch citizen, and his wife. The family told the immigration service that Kumari was needed in the country to help them after the couple lost their infant daughter.

The immigration service iND rejected the application and the family subsequently lost on appeal, with the court finding the relationship didn’t meet the threshold for “family life” under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Previous rulings from the Strasbourg court have found that the right to family life between adult children and their parents needed “additional
elements of dependence, involving more than normal emotional ties.”

The judges found that such additional needs were not present, in particular because the couple had managed to continue working and otherwise maintain normal lives despite the death of their daughter.

In the second case, the court found the Netherlands had erred when it denied Martinez Alvarado a residency permit in 2017. Alvarado, who lives in Peru, was intellectually disabled and had been cared for by his parents until their deaths in 2010 and 2014.

Alvarado’s four sisters live in the Netherlands, some of whom are Dutch nationals. They brought him to the Netherlands to take care of him but the IND rejected his application, arguing another brother living in Peru could do this.

In that case, the judge found that “There was no doubt that his disability incapacitated him to the extent that he had been compelled to rely on his sisters’ care and support in his daily life since the death of his parents.”

According to the court, the government failed to show the brother, who traveled frequently for work, could care for Alvarado, nor was there sufficient government support in Peru to provide adequate care.