The immigration service IND says it has seen a huge rise in cases of Dutch families claiming parental rights for children from migrant families, fuelling suspicions that the system is being manipulated.

The increase follows a European court judgment in 2017 that a non-EU national should be given residency rights in the Netherlands if they were responsible for a Dutch child.

Since the judgment the number of applications by Dutch families to take legal responsibility for a child has jumped from less than 100 to several thousand, NRC reported, citing documents obtained from the justice ministry.

The IND believes some of these applications are initiated by migrants who hope to secure residential status by having their children acknowledged by Dutch families they have no other connection with.

The service received 410 reports last year from municipalities or embassies who suspected children had been acknowledged so that their natural parents could claim residency, up from 250 in 2024.

In 2024 NRC highlighted the case of a Surinamese-Dutch man whose name had been included in 47 applications and another who had claimed responsibility for 25 children with 17 different mothers.

Financial gain

The newspaper quoted an IND report linking many of the applications to a network of so-called “shadow fathers” who acknowledged children for “financial gain”.

Acknowledgment is a different procedure from adoption and is often by couples who have children from previous relationships to include them in their new, blended family.

Anyone can apply to acknowledge a child, as long as they have permission from the mother for a child under 16, they are not a direct blood relative and the child does not have two legal parents already.

The government included plans in its coalition agreement in January to make it an offence to acknowledge a child for the sole purpose of obtaining residency rights for the parents, but it is difficult to prove in practice because the burden is on the IND to rule out any other motive.

Under the current law, parents can only be prosecuted for human trafficking or using forged documents to support an application for acknowledgment.

The prosecution service is preparing three test cases in the civil courts where it will challenge a decision to grant acknowledgment rights on the grounds that the application was made purely so that the child’s parents could claim residency.

The government is also looking at introducing new restrictions, such as requiring applications to be made in the municipality where the parents live, and giving council staff who deal with the applications more training to spot fraudulent cases.