Europe’s homeless asylum seeker crisis: ‘This is not human rights, I am staying in the street with a baby’

Less than 10 feet from the gates of the centre where asylum seekers register in central Brussels, a mother and her three-year-old daughter are sitting on a pile of cardboard laid out on the ground. Standing beside them, Yousef*, the 40-year-old husband and father, explains how the family had previously fled Palestine and recently arrived in Belgium.

The streets surrounding the Fedasil arrival centre, the first port of call of asylum seekers to claim international protection, has for months on end been a visible manifestation of the Belgian state’s failure to cope with an increase in arrivals. Like Mount Street in Dublin, a large encampment of homeless asylum seekers’ tents has built up in front of the building. Now police routinely clear off tents each morning.

Yousef says after being sent between two addresses he was told he was too late to register that day. A sign on the imposing gates of the building, a former barracks, says it will be closed for several days. “I have a baby, if I am by myself I can stay on the street, there is no problem, but because of the child they should look for us for help,” he says.

“Today I am surprised, this is not human rights, I am staying in the street with a baby,” he says. Yousef says his plan now is to call a friend he knows who lives two hours outside of Brussels, to ask them to take the family in until they can return when the arrival centre is next open.

Brussels is mentioned in the same breath as Dublin and Paris when civil society figures talk about EU countries leaving large numbers of male asylum seekers homeless. Last August, Nicole de Moor, secretary of state for asylum, announced Belgium would no longer offer accommodation to single male asylum seekers as its reception system was overwhelmed. That has left thousands of asylum seekers fighting for scarce beds in homeless shelters, sleeping rough in doorways or in tents, and living in overcrowded squats in derelict buildings.

Vincent Manteca Villanueva, who runs mobile outreach teams organised by homeless charity Samusocial, estimates the numbers in squats in Brussels has doubled in recent years. Some people are living in buildings with no windows, holes in the roof, faeces on the floor, and needles strewn about, he says. “It is truly worrying. There is real pressure on services, because we can’t help everybody,” he says. Last year a major police operation cleared a large squat near the Brussels-North train station where several hundred people had been staying. Medical screenings afterwards found outbreaks of scabies and cases of tuberculosis.

There were 3,801 asylum seekers in Belgium without accommodation at the start of April. A spokesman for asylum agency Fedasil says some of those have places in homeless hostels, but it does not have a number for how many. “It’s uncertain whether all these individuals are currently still within Belgian territory, as the waiting list dates back to May 2022,” he says. “Fedasil regrets this situation and is doing everything possible to accommodate as many individuals as possible,” he adds.

Freek Spinnewijn, director of Feantsa, a European network of homeless organisations, says failures in migration policy over recent years has led to failures in homeless policy. “In my organisation we say we’re not responsible for solving the migration crisis, what we want is [that] flaws in migration don’t produce more homelessness and that’s what is happening,” he says. Countries’ inability to cope with the significant influx of asylum seekers has led to large numbers of the vulnerable cohort ending up in homeless accommodation.

“When I started working for Feantsa more than 20 years ago the impact of migration policies on homelessness was an issue for the south, countries like Italy, Spain, Greece. Now it is an issue for the entire west of Europe,” Spinnewijn says. “With the Ukraine war and the influx of Ukrainian refugees it’s also an issue in the east of Europe. You could say that the primary issue in relation to homelessness has become migration and asylum.”

The response of the Belgian government has been to pump money into homeless services to open more beds in shelters, rather than contract rooms from hotels to accommodate asylum seekers. In Ireland, the Government took the decision to keep asylum and homeless accommodation separate. The nearly 2,000 asylum seekers the Department of Integration is unable to accommodate cannot turn to the shelters funded by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive. This has led to the makeshift tent encampments on Mount Street in Dublin city, and later along the Grand Canal.

Belgian authorities have been chastised by the courts many times for breaching EU law by leaving asylum seekers without accommodation. “That public admission that rule of law doesn’t count for these people I find really quite shocking,” Spinnewijn says.

It is a little after 3pm and a drop-in legal advice service run by the Flanders Refugee Council near the Fedasil arrival centre is busy. It opens in the afternoon three times a week and usually helps about 50 asylum seekers a day. Helena Laureyns (26), who works on a team running a helpline for the organisation, says men who are not accommodated often do not know where to go to find an immigration lawyer.

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Laureyns says many homeless asylum seekers are left waiting months before the state offer them accommodation. “Some of them are sleeping rough, they don’t have any connections, they don’t have anywhere to go,” she says. “There are homeless shelters but they are very hard to get into… It’s usually for one night, and people are not going to give up their place in a squat for one night in a homeless shelter.”

In Paris, efforts to clear away homeless asylum seekers’ camps have been criticised as an attempt to push the problem out of sight, as the French city prepares to host the Olympics later this summer. In the run-up to the Games, police routinely sweep areas under bridges along the Seine river to dismantle groups of tents, putting up metal fences in their place.

Since last year the French government has pursued a policy of attempting to relocate asylum seekers to cities and towns outside of Paris. Asylum seekers are promised that they will be put up for three weeks in temporary housing, if they agree to be transferred.

In some cases this has led to bizarre situations where asylum seekers will agree to be bussed out of Paris and spend three weeks in another city or region, and then return to the capital to be transferred elsewhere to avail of another three weeks’ accommodation.

Those who opt to remain in the capital are moved on to find somewhere else to sleep rough.

Adele Croise, refugee policy officer with Fédération Solidarité in France, says about a fifth of asylum seekers in France are in Paris, where numbers far outstrip available accommodation. Emergency homeless shelters are also at capacity. Some of those on the streets have secured refugee status, but are still left sleeping rough, which she says is “a huge failure” of the French government. “We are struggling so much with the homelessness situation,” she says.

The policy of pushing asylum seekers out of Paris to “pretend” it does not have a homelessness problem for July and August is “terrible”. It is also not working. “What we have been seeing, the people who are leaving Paris, they are coming back,” she says. In one locality that was told to expect 50 asylum seekers, when the bus pulled up it turned out only eight had agreed to leave Paris.

The constant police sweeps breaking up asylum seekers’ camps mean people are being moved “every day”, Croise says. Organisations working with asylum seekers are concerned this will encourage people to “hide” and make the vulnerable group harder to reach. The French ministry responsible for asylum policy did not respond to requests for comment.

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Further east, the bigger challenge for many EU capitals has been how to cope with the large numbers of refugees who have fled Ukraine following the Russian invasion in early 2022.

In Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, civil society organisations are concerned about a rise in Ukrainian refugees falling into homelessness. The central European country of 10.6 million took in one of the highest proportions of Ukrainians, with more than 300,000 in the country. Research late last year found homeless services in Prague had begun to notice an increase in the number of Ukrainian refugees seeking help.

Last July, the government there limited state-provided accommodation for Ukrainians to 150 days, with plans to reduce it further to 90 days this September, which would bring it into line with Ireland. Elena Tulupova, who chairs the Agency for Migration and Adaptation, a voluntary migrant support organisation, says she has a “huge concern” about support being tapered off.

Frontline services have already been raising the alarm about a rise in homeless Ukrainians since the middle of last year. “We are definitely expecting a worsening of the situation from the 1st of September,” she says. Tulupova says there appears to be an effort to “press” people to return to Ukraine, or move to other EU countries.

A spokesman for the Czech ministry of the interior says the provision of emergency accommodation to Ukrainians fleeing the war was never going to be a “permanent solution”. The government official says efforts will be taken to “minimise” the possibility of Ukrainians leaving state accommodation falling into homelessness.

In the first weeks of the war many Ukrainians from the Roma minority were left sleeping in train stations and parks in Prague, according to Jan Husák, director of foreign affairs at Romodrom. The Roma rights organisation says authorities are “suspicious” of Roma refugees fleeing Ukraine and as a result there are delays offering them accommodation. Officials want to make the process “less pleasant” for the ethnic group, in a “clear and very apparent case of discrimination,” Husák says.

The minority are now concerned they will face the same treatment as the safety net of state support is cut back. As a result many are already moving further west to countries like Germany and the Netherlands, or returning to Ukraine, he says.

*Name has been changed.