Teeven removes refugee, angers Mayor

In Utrecht, state secretary for Security and Justice Fred Teeven has upset Mayor Jan van Zanen by executing a 'power-play', removing an asylum seeker from a center without consulting the Mayor, which is the agreement, RTV Utrecht reports. The VVD Mayor is angry with his party cohort Teeven after he sent the refugee police to remove a Somali man whose application for asylum was rejected from the Utrecht asylum seekers' center. The Mayor claims not to have received notice about this, which is the agreement. The Mayor is joined in his anger by a majority of the municipal council in Utrecht. These parties don't want rejected asylum seekers to end up roaming the streets. Faction president of the D66 in Utrecht, Klaas Verschuure, wonders where the "respect for an Utrecht approach" went. PvdA faction president Marleen Haage calls Teeven's "power-play" impossible. Steven de Vries of GroenLinks says Teeven's actions were "disproportionate and unprecedented", while faction president for ChristenUnie Maarten van Ooijen wonders "where this will stop." According to RTL Nieuws, the affected asylum seeker, the Somali man whose application was rejected, is currently in emergency housing. De Telegraaf writes that the man has been rejected for the past four years, during which time he has simply claimed a spot in the asylum seekers' center, but actually stayed with his girlfriend in Utrecht for some time, claiming €57 a week in allowance from the center, the paper writes. Teeven simply bypassed the Mayor, who was reportedly doing nothing to stop the asylum seeker, and called on the police to take the man from the center. For this, D66 MP Gerard Schouw believes Teeven should be called into Parliament on Tuesday.