He had become, unintentionally, the symbol of the politics of“extreme rigor” The Netherlands has been denied immigration status, but 11-year-old Mikael Matosyan should avoid deportation to Armenia, the country where his parents are from and where he has never been. On Tuesday 27 August, the day before he was to be deported with his mother, his lawyers filed a new application for a residence permit. They are invoking new arguments aimed at allowing the young man to continue living in Amsterdam and attend school there.
The lawyers argue that Mikael’s father, who came to the Netherlands in 2010 with his wife after fleeing Armenia, separated from his son’s mother eight years later. He then remarried a Dutch woman, had other children and automatically obtained a residence permit, as the law stipulates that a father cannot be separated from his children. The lawyers claim in their application that the father’s rights would be violated if his son were expelled and that he cannot be forced to choose between his children.
European law on family life
However, immigration services will have to check whether the man really has “close ties” with his son, as the latter’s lawyers claim. Mikael’s mother could not be deported either because she could not be separated from her child, the lawyers claim, referring to the provisions of European law on family life.
On 31 July, the Council of State ruled – definitively in principle – on the cases of Mikael and his mother, and ordered their expulsion. The judges considered that the mother had evaded the control of the authorities for too many years, while underlining the risk “of stress and uncertainty” for her son if he were to leave the country. Marjolein Faber, the Minister for Asylum and Migration, a member of Geert Wilders’ far-right party, refused to intervene, unlike her predecessors who were faced with such situations. She deplored, on Wednesday, “stacking of procedures” in this folder.
It was a mobilization of the press, of a section of public opinion and of the opposition parties to the right-wing government that made the case of young Mikael the typical example of a situation summed up by one commentator: “Voters demand a strict policy, but they change their minds when it has a face.” Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, which came out on top in the November 2023 election, secured its success by counting on closing borders and expelling illegal immigrants.
