A national of Burundi requested international protection in the Netherlands. The State Secretary decided not to examine his application, since it found that Croatia was the Member State responsible for examining the application. The State Secretary sent a take back request to Croatia, which was accepted.

The applicant appealed the decision to the District Court of the Hague seated in Roermond and claimed that he had no intention of seeking asylum in Croatia, that he was abused and bitten in Croatia by a dog that was unleashed on him, and that the principle of mutual trust could no longer be relied upon in respect of Croatia. He also claimed that the State Secretary had not sufficiently investigated the situation in Croatia. Moreover, he had health issues that demanded that he had access to health care after a potential transfer.

The court stated that general country information and ECtHR case law showed that Croatia had carried out pushbacks on a large scale over a longer period of time. The court went on to state that the question of whether the principle of mutual trust could be relied upon was still at issue concerning Croatia, and that that question was not necessarily solved from the information provided by the Croatian authorities. The court’s seat in 's-Hertogenbosch has therefore referred questions for a preliminary ruling in the case Applicant v State Secretary, NL22.6989, ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2022:5724, 15 June 2022.

These questions referred for a preliminary ruling concern the assessment of the legality of a transfer decision to Poland. The court held that the situation in Croatia was similar to the situation in Poland as regards the systematic and large-scale pushbacks at the external borders by the authorities. The court therefore considered that the questions referred for a preliminary ruling on the divisibility, scope and meaning of the principle of interstate trust were also relevant to the present proceedings.

The court therefore decided to stay the proceedings until the questions referred had been answered by the CJEU, and to decide only on the question of interim measures against the transfer decision. The court stated that, in the light of the points of law pending before the CJEU, it could not be held in advance that the applicant's action had no reasonable chance of success. It noted that ordering an injunction prevented the applicant from being transferred before the court ruled on the appeal against the transfer decision. It was also noted that in order to prevent the applicant from finding himself in a situation contrary to Article 4 of the Charter after transfer, the court had to assign more importance to preventing the transfer than to the State Secretary’s interest in being able to implement the transfer decision. The court thus suspended the contested decision and provided that the applicant could not be transferred in any event until the appeal had been decided.