The titular magistrates of the Courts of Instruction 6, 19 and 20 of Madrid have required the Ministry of the Interior and the General Commissariat for Immigration and Borders to adopt, “urgently”, measures to end the “situation of overcrowding” existing in the asylum rooms of the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport.
The agreement, sent this Friday by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, is the result of a complaint made by the State coordinator of the Legal Service of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR) after a visit to the rooms by the titular judges of the Control Courts of the airport’s inadmissibility room.
The complaint stated that, since last summer, there has been “an exponential increase” in the number of applicants for international protection at this airport and delays in the formalization of applications, which has caused a situation of “overcrowding” of the airports. rooms located in T1. This has caused the T1 and T4 rooms usually used for inadmissible persons (those waiting to be returned to their country of origin) to be opened for those migrants who are waiting to see whether their application is admitted or processed or not. As a consequence, according to According to the complaint, the rooms are overcrowded with around 250 people, with the “deterioration” in hygienic conditions and food shortages that this entails.
This “overcrowding” has been confirmed during a visit to the airport’s inadmissible room by the control judges, in which it was found that many admitted people were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. All of this “without the slightest conditions of health, hygiene and privacy, which allow them to protect their basic rights in the circumstances in which they find themselves, in some cases dealing with families and minors.”
The Madrid Police Headquarters informed the magistrates that both rooms have a total capacity of 156 people and there are 244 people in them, 19 of them minors. He also specified that since August the increase in asylum applications at the border has been “exponential”, going from 767 applicants from August to November 2022 to 1,357 in the same period of 2023.
The Police report concluded that “measures are being carried out with those responsible for each of the areas involved”, from the airport manager to the Asylum and Refuge Office of the Ministry of the Interior, to “resolve as soon as possible.” the situation generated”. After the control judges verified the conditions in which the asylum seekers were found and “given the unsustainable situation generated as a result of the excess” of requests, the magistrates have formally requested the Ministry of the Interior and the General Immigration Commission and Borders to take “the necessary measures to effectively resolve the situation generated.”
