Belgium's Immigration Service Fails Families: Official Report Exposes Years-Long Delays and Rights Violations
Netherlands, 8 June 2026
A damning official report published on 7 June 2026 reveals that complaints about Belgian immigration services now represent 44% of all federal complaints, with families separated for years due to systemic failures described as violations of fundamental civil rights.
A System Under Strain
The Federal Ombudsman’s special report, published on 7 June 2026, does not mince words. Belgium’s immigration apparatus — principally the Dienst Vreemdelingenzaken (DVZ), the country’s Immigration Office, and the FOD Buitenlandse Zaken (Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs) — is described as operating with ‘structural and fundamental’ failures that, in the Ombudsman’s own assessment, amount to violations of the basic civil rights of the people it is meant to serve [1][4]. Federal Ombudsman David Baele stated plainly: ‘In many cases, the civil rights of these people are not being respected’ [4]. The scale of the problem is reflected in the complaint statistics alone: asylum and migration complaints rose from 37% of all well-founded federal complaints in 2023 to 44% — representing 1,262 individual complaints — in 2025 [4]. That upward trajectory, 18.919 percentage points as a proportional rise from the 2023 baseline, points not to a temporary backlog but to a deepening, systemic failure [4].
What Is the DVZ, and Why Does It Matter?
For readers unfamiliar with the Belgian administrative landscape, the DVZ is the government body responsible for determining who may enter, reside in, or be removed from Belgium [GPT]. It processes visa applications, residence permit renewals, and family reunification requests — the procedure by which a foreign national already living legally in Belgium can bring close family members to join them [GPT]. It is this last category, family reunification (gezinshereniging in Dutch), that features prominently in the Ombudsman’s findings [1][4]. When this process stalls — due to administrative backlogs, unclear rules, or inadequate communication — the human cost is immediate and severe: families are kept apart, sometimes for years [1][4]. The Ombudsman’s report documents cases including a registration procedure that took three years to complete, a medical regularisation case that stretched to fifteen years, and a Congolese woman whose family reunification application was blocked in 2024 due to an administrative backlog at the DVZ [4].
Real Lives, Real Consequences
The report is anchored not merely in statistics but in the lived experiences of individuals navigating a system that Baele describes as opaque and unresponsive [1]. Rawan Qassem, an optometrist who arrived in Belgium in 2022 via a family reunification visa — meaning she entered the country legally through an established route designed precisely for this purpose — nonetheless waited eight months before receiving the work permit that would allow her to practise her profession [1]. ‘I was legally in the country, via a family reunification visa, but the permission to work dragged on,’ she said [1]. Her occupation is classified as a knelpuntberoep — a shortage profession, a role in which Belgium has a documented shortfall of qualified workers — making the delay not only a personal hardship but an economic inefficiency [1]. The rules surrounding her situation were, in Baele’s words, ‘unclear and lacking in comprehensible communication’ [1].
Eight Years of Uncertainty
The case of Gamaal El-Attar, a self-employed individual who has lived and worked in Belgium since 2018, illustrates the cumulative toll of a system that fails its residents repeatedly over many years [1]. El-Attar has experienced renewal waiting times for his residence card that previously stretched to 14 months, and at the time of the report’s publication had already been waiting six months — since December 2025 — for his current renewal [1]. The practical consequences have been stark: he lost access to Itsme (Belgium’s widely used digital identity application), faced travel restrictions, and had his bank account blocked [1]. ‘All that time, as a self-employed person, I had to pay taxes — a lot of taxes. But I received no services in return. And today I am in the same Kafkaesque situation: I work, I pay taxes, and I have been waiting six months again for the renewal of my residence card,’ El-Attar said [1]. On 7 June 2026, following direct intervention by the Ombudsman, El-Attar was finally able to submit an application for a permanent residence card at his local municipality [1]. That application is expected to be processed by approximately 21 June 2026 [alert! ‘Source describes this as a pending deadline without confirmation of completion; outcome unverified at time of publication’] [1].
A Pattern That Repeats Itself
What distinguishes this report from routine administrative criticism is the Ombudsman’s explicit acknowledgement that the problems are not new and are not being resolved [4]. ‘But after every resolved case, we receive another complaint about the same problem. And that has been going on for years,’ Baele stated [4]. The DVZ, through its spokeswoman Paulien Blondeel, acknowledged ‘a number of structural points of concern’ [4]. The FOD Buitenlandse Zaken’s spokesman Laurens Soenen indicated that ‘the processes of the consular services are regularly analysed and improved’ [4]. In practical terms, the DVZ has noted that new IT systems are intended to address the increased caseload and legal complexity [4], and that in 2025 the FOD Buitenlandse Zaken opened new visa application centres while the DVZ recruited additional staff for its returns and international protection divisions [4]. However, the Ombudsman’s report makes clear that the services responsible for access to Belgian territory — those handling visas and residence permits — are yet to receive equivalent reinforcement [4]. Those services are described as due to be strengthened ‘in the near future’ [alert! ‘No specific timeline or staffing numbers are given in the source; this remains an unverified commitment’] [4].
A Regional Issue, and What Comes Next
Belgium is not alone in facing scrutiny over migration processing times. In the Netherlands, the equivalent procedure for recognised refugees wishing to bring family members to join them — known as nareis — has also drawn criticism from asylum seekers and legal aid organisations regarding the processing times at the IND (Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst, the Dutch immigration authority) [GPT]. For those residing in Dutch reception centres — whether standard asylum seeker centres (AZC), police locations (POL), or emergency accommodation (noodopvang) — the Belgian findings serve as a documented regional parallel to concerns that have been raised domestically [GPT]. One significant regulatory development on the immediate horizon is the entry into force of the European Union’s Migration and Asylum Pact, which is scheduled to take effect on Friday, 12 June 2026 [4]. This package of EU-wide rules is intended to standardise and reform migration processing across member states, including Belgium and the Netherlands [GPT]. Whether it will provide meaningful relief to the individuals currently caught in administrative limbo remains to be seen [alert! ‘The practical impact of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact on existing backlogs in Belgium and the Netherlands is not addressed in the available sources and cannot be determined at this time’]. What is clear, as Baele summarised on 7 June 2026, is that migration services are ‘structurally and fundamentally violating the fundamental rights of citizens’ [1] — and that for the families separated by these delays, words of intent from administrations carry little weight without the evidence of shorter waiting times and clearer communication to back them up.