Refugee organisations have criticised the government’s decision to stop automatically accepting refugees from Ivory Coast and Sudan and to introduce individual assessments instead, the Volkskrant reports.

On Friday, junior justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced the end of group assessment for asylum seekers from ‘dangerous’ countries. The increase in asylum applications and fraud are affecting public support for the asylum process, she said.
‘I understand policy is under threat because the Netherlands is more flexible than its neighbouring countries, but try to change others’ strategy instead,’ Tineke Ceelen of the Refugee Foundation said.
A spokesman for refugee organsation Vluchtelingenwerk said that people from Ivory Coast and Sudan would now be required to show that violence was being specifically directed at them. But this is ‘almost impossible’ because of the random nature of the violence, he told the paper.