A Palestinian applicant applied for international protection in the Netherlands. The State Secretary found, after a Eurodac hit showing that the applicant had entered Spain illegally when arriving to the territory of the Member States, that Spain was responsible for his application for international protection. The State Secretary therefore dismissed his application and decided to transfer the applicant to Spain. The applicant appealed the decision to the District Court of the Hague seated in Rotterdam. The applicant contended that the Dutch authorities could not rely on the principle of interstate trust in relation to Spain.

The District Court of the Hague seated in Rotterdam cited a case from 8 July 2021, ECLI:NL:RVS:2021:1481, in which the Council of State ruled that the principle of interstate protection of legitimate expectations could be relied upon with regards to Spain. This was later confirmed in the judgment of 27 January 2023, ECLI:NL:RVS:2023:364. The burden of proof was therefore on the applicant to make it plausible that the situation had changed.

The applicant made references to the AIDA Country Report: Spain, 2022 Update, of April 2023. The applicant claimed that the report showed that, upon transfer, he would run a real risk to have no access to the asylum procedure or very difficult access to the asylum procedure and that he would not receive reception for a longer period of time.

The court found that the passages from the 2022 Update cited by the applicant did not paint a materially different picture of the situation in Spain than the previous Updates. It noted that already in the 2019 Update (p. 34) it was mentioned that there were problems with access to the asylum procedure and reception conditions. It further noted that in the 2022 Update (p. 49-51) those problems still existed, but they did not amount to being structural shortcomings that reached the high threshold of severity in Article 3 of the ECHR. The court went on to note that the European Commission had launched infringement proceedings in January 2023 (INF(2022)2158) for Spain's failure to properly implement EU reception standards (2022 Update, p. 98). However, this procedure was still at an early stage, as the European Commission first gave the Spanish authorities two months to remedy the lack of implementation. The court therefore stated that it could not be said yet that there were structural shortcomings.

The court went on to state that, in May 2022, a UNHCR representative noted that it was extremely complicated to get an appointment to express a wish for asylum in Spain. Dublin transferees experienced the same difficulties as other asylum seekers in gaining access to the asylum procedure and reception conditions. However, it was unclear whether these comments were based on new factual information compared to the 2021 Update. Therefore, it was noted that those observations did not show that the difficulties were such that the applicant ran a real risk of not having access to the asylum procedure or reception. Moreover, the court observed that with the explicit transfer agreement, the Spanish authorities guaranteed that they would process the applicant's asylum application. The court also underlined that if the applicant is not provided access to the asylum procedure or reception, he has a remedy to complain. It was not shown that the Spanish authorities could not or would not help him if transferred to Spain. The court found that the State Secretary was right to rely on the principle of interstate trust.

The applicant further claimed that he had medical issues and that he was dependent on his siblings in the Netherlands. The court found no such dependency link.

Lastly, the court found no ground to apply the discretionary clause in Article 17 under the Dublin III Regulation to make the Netherlands responsible for the applicant’s request.

The court therefore rejected the appeal in its entirety.