City of Brussels accommodated thirty unaccompanied minors for one night in a hotel (Brussels)
The city of Brussels has decided to allow thirty unaccompanied minors to spend one night in a hotel on Thursday. The thirty are part of the sixty minors for whom there was no place in a center of Fedasil, the agency for asylum reception. Aid organizations will receive the thirty others.
Source: BELGA
“We couldn’t allow minors to sleep in the streets of Ham again,” said Wafaa, spokeswoman for Brussels mayor Philippe Close (PS). “The organizations found a building in Elsen for the solution.”
Aid organizations, such as citizen platform BelRefugees and Samusocial, had set up supported tents in front of the humanitarian hub in the Havenlaan in Brussels on Monday to let seven unaccompanied minors sleep there. At Fedasil, 39 minors had not been given a reception place at the time. Nine found a solution through the aid network for the migrants, seven slept in the tents. The others are not known where they went.
No room
But on Wednesday, the Brussels police removed the tents. “The city is also busy at the federal level to find a structural solution,” the Close cabinet said in a press release. “The mayor cannot accept minors sleeping on the street on his territory.”
Subsequently, it turned out that there was no room for 60 unaccompanied minors, and that the organizations could only accommodate half of them. The city therefore decided to accommodate the thirty others in a hotel for one night.