Compensation for slow asylum procedures to top €65m, scheme has now been scrapped

The Dutch immigration service IND has set aside €65.4m to compensate asylum seekers whose cases take too long to process this year, website Nu.nl reported on Thursday. Last year the IND handed out €6.6m to refugees whose applications for asylum took too long to deal with. In April, the government set up a special task force and charged it with clearing the backlog of 15,300 cases, but so far just 4,000 of them have been processed. The task force focuses on people who arrived in the Netherlands before April 1 while new arrivals fall under the regular procedures, and this is likely to mean their cases will be examined earlier.