The immigration service IND paid out around €99 million in court-ordered penalties in the first seven months of this year for failing to decide on residency and asylum applications on time, already exceeding the record €79 million it paid in the whole of 2025.
Asylum minister Bart van den Brink revealed the figures in a written response to requests from MPs.
The IND paid €36.8 million in penalties in 2024 and €79 million in 2025, when the average waiting time for an asylum decision reached 67 weeks. The 2026 total is running at about €14 million a month, against €6.6 million a month last year.
The answers also show the number of individual payments above €3,000 has risen from 858 in 2023 to 6,368 in 2025. By July 2 this year the IND had already made 5,442 such payments.
How the penalties work
The IND is required by law to decide on an application within six months. If it misses the deadline, the applicant can ask a court to set a new one, and the court can attach a daily penalty if that deadline is also missed.
Courts normally set the penalty at €100 a day up to a maximum of €15,000, rising to €250 a day and a €37,500 cap where a “strong incentive” is needed, according to the minister’s answers. Applicants can go back to court as often as they like for as long as no decision has been taken, so the totals in individual cases can build up over time.
Between the start of 2024 and May 11 this year, 143,190 people filed an appeal against a late decision, and 16,570 of them won two or more times, the minister said.
By July 29, courts had ordered the IND to pay a total of more than €80,000 to 46 individuals for failing to decide on their applications, and nine people received over €100,000.
Abolishing penalties
Boomsma, who submitted the questions, told the Telegraaf the system was “completely bankrupt”, with court rulings making decisions ever harder to reach and taxpayers then paying for the resulting delays.
The IND has called for the penalties to be scrapped, saying they do nothing to speed up decisions and that dealing with the court cases takes staff away from processing applications.
An amendment abolishing court-imposed penalties in immigration cases, tabled by the orthodox Protestant SGP and JA21, was passed by the lower house of parliament in June as part of a wider bill on the detention of foreign nationals. The bill is now before the senate, which rejected the previous asylum emergency measures law containing the same measure in April.
Van den Brink said no date has been set for the senate debate and he could not estimate how much more the IND would have to pay before any abolition took effect. He also declined to forecast the total for 2026.
A previous attempt to scrap the penalties was struck down by the Council of State in 2022 as a breach of EU law, and refugee organisation VluchtelingenWerk has told MPs it considers the new amendment unlawful on the same grounds.
