By Bogumila Hall and Marina de Regt – Recent clashes between the Houthis and anti-Houthi forces in Yemen have led to hundreds of “casualties”, thousands of wounded and tens of thousands of people internally displaced. The truce that Saudi Arabia and the Houthis reached in spring 2022 has definitely come to an end. A week ago, on Friday 11 September, the Houthis took control of Bab Al-Mandeb, the important strait between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa and since then fighting continues. While these events were a shock to many, for Yemeni asylum seekers in the Netherlands it is rather a continuation of crisis that was never over.
The insistence that ‘Yemen is not safe’ was at the core of a sit-in staged throughout May and June 2026 in front of the office of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) in the Hague, where Yemenis protested against the systematic rejection of their asylum claims and the years of appeals and uncertainty that follow. Until recently, the Netherlands was considered one of Europe’s most welcoming destinations for Yemenis, granting humanitarian protection through accelerated procedures. Since 2017, around 6,000 Yemenis have been granted asylum.
However, in March 2024, Dutch authorities ended their policy of generally granting Yemeni asylum seekers subsidiary protection and introduced individualized assessments of each claim. The change followed an updated country report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which concluded that although Yemen remained fragile, the security situation had improved and not everyone was at risk. It also followed the judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which requires asylum authorities to assess claims on an individualized basis by considering both country conditions and the applicant’s personal circumstances. As a result, 81 per cent of Yemeni asylum applications are now rejected by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) at first instance.
For the Yemenis we have spoken to during the sit-in, however, this understanding of safety fails to capture the realities from which they fled. Their accounts point to an insecurity that is diffuse and multi-layered. Violence, economic breakdown, hunger, institutional failure, and militias rule all intertwine, shaping people’s ability to live safely and with dignity. One of the people we spoke to described it with these words: “There is no functioning state. People work without salaries. Hospitals are not functioning. People are hungry. Both in the North and South, militias corrupt children, they give them drugs and weapons so that they join them. Imagine, you have a situation where children are under drugs and hold weapons! Everything is unpredictable!’
We often hear similar concerns from friends who stayed behind in Yemen. They describe the impossibility of living a decent life as caused by the erosion of social trust and breakdown of the society. This sense of insecurity falls between the categories of the asylum law, which tends to distinguish between generalized violence and individualized persecution. The IND’s reading of Yemen as partially ‘safe’ echoes Eurocentric understandings of war as an exceptional event, a site of spectacular violence and dying. But anthropological research has shown a different reality. Wars in most parts of the world constitute “the environment in which life is waged” (Khayyat 2025) structuring how life is lived and maintained daily. Thus, the fact that life goes on, does not make the situation in Yemen any more liveable.
For Yemenis who manage to make it to the Netherlands, going through asylum procedures comes with its own challenges. Even those who share individualized stories of threats are routinely rejected by the IND, as their lived experiences don’t match the evidentiary standards required by the asylum system. One man – whose legs bore scars from bullet wounds but nevertheless failed to convince authorities that his life was at risk – remarked that the sheer fact of staying alive makes one suspicious. “I should have died first and then come apply for asylum”, he joked bitterly. Those whose experiences are complex, fragmented, or difficult to document frequently struggle to establish credibility.
Among the around 1000 Yemenis isolated in asylum centres across the Netherlands many spend years appealing rejections of their claims. As one of the community activists described the effects of waiting; “People in the camps are depressed, many suffer badly. You’re in between states. Not deported and not allowed to stay. You don’t know what will happen. People go crazy from the stress.”
There is a large body of research that demonstrates how going through the asylum procedure has detrimental effects on people’s mental health and bodies, leaving them worn by dire living conditions but even more by the uncertainty, and the sense of being not believed and not valued. Furthermore, asylum seekers tend to be spatially and socially isolated in the camps, often not able to study or work.
These themes come up regularly in our research with Yemenis, who argue that having one’s life on hold for several years is more traumatising than the life-threatening journeys that brought them to Europe in the first place. If informal migration routes involve significant dangers, people risk their lives because they hope for better futures. Instead, Yemenis in the Netherlands find themselves trapped in a state of prolonged uncertainty that suspends precisely the possibility of life-making. “We’re human beings and we have a right to life,” read one banner displayed at the sit-in in the Hague, articulating Yemenis’ desire to finally live fully. The current events add to their stress, with many of them deeply worried about family members and the future of their beloved country.
Bogumila Hall is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of VU. Her research focuses on Yemeni refugees in The Netherlands and Germany. Marina de Regt is Associate Professor at the same department. She writes and speaks regularly about the situation in Yemen.
Heel belangrijk dat er aandacht wordt gevraagd voor deze situatie. Veiligheid en menselijkheid moeten altijd vooropstaan.
Met zulk artikelen kunnen we de bewustwording rondom de situatie van Jemenitische vluchtelingen vergroten. En hopelijk helpt dit om meer begrip en een eerlijker beleid te creëren.