English summaryAsylum accounts before the Dutch courts

16,721 Dutch asylum rulings, analysed by type of refugee account.

Strongest: Blood feud or honour killing, the decision stands in 78%. Weakest: Religious conversion, 49%.

Toetssteen collects every published ruling of the Dutch courts on asylum decisions by the immigration service (IND), classifies the account the claim rests on, and reports what the court upheld: per story type, per country of origin and per individual case. Every figure is traceable to a case number (ECLI) and a quoted passage.

Rulings collected

16,721

Published rulings from the Dutch judiciary's open data API.

With a substantive account

6,807

Rulings that assess the asylum account itself.

With a named story type

5,153

Classified into one of the archetypes below.

Story types and outcomes Countries of origin Method and limits

01Story types

What the courts upheld, per type of account

Denominator: 5,153 rulings with a named story type. The percentage is the share of judged cases in which the court left the immigration service's decision intact.

Political activity

1,25463.2%

LGBTI orientation

1,09772.5%

Blood feud or honour killing

69678.5%

Religious conversion

67048.6%

Family ties

51167.5%

Concealed origin

36771.1%

Military service

21270.0%

Draft evasion

13972.0%

Medical grounds

12563.6%

Document fraud

8272.5%

BronDutch judiciary open data (rechtspraak.nl), classified automatically with a source passage per ruling. Overall upheld rate in 2024: 87%.

02Reading the data

What these numbers do and do not say

Only contested decisions reach a court, and only a part of those rulings is published. The register therefore describes published judicial review, not the asylum procedure as a whole. Granted applications never appear.

Classification is automated and checked against a quoted passage; residual error is reported per archetype together with a Wilson confidence interval on the Dutch pages.

Source language

Court rulings, quoted passages and case summaries are in Dutch, as published by the Dutch judiciary. These English pages summarise the figures and the method. The full detail lives on the Dutch home page (in Dutch).