Leers gets tough on ‘criminal foreigners’

Immigrants convicted of a crime and given a sentence of at least one night in jail or youth detention within one year of their arrival in the Netherlands will be stripped of their residency permits, if new immigration rules become law.


Immigration minister Gerd Leers wants to make it easier to deport criminal foreigners so that they recognise ‘criminal behaviour threatens their residency status’, the Volkskrant reports on Friday.
Currently, the justice ministry uses a sliding scale to determine if criminal immigrants should be deported. At the moment, someone who has lived in the Netherlands for seven years can be stripped of their residency rights and deported if they commit a crime with a three-year jail term.
However, experts say getting tougher on foreigners who commit crimes may conflict with European human rights treaties. For example, everyone has the right to a family life and deporting fathers would conflict with that, the paper says.

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