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Belgium to create urgently 2,500 additional reception places for asylum seekers

Xinhua, August 8, 2015 Adjust font size:

Faced with the influx of asylum seekers, the Belgian government has approved to urgently create some 2,500 additional reception places, according to official source on Friday.

A budget of some 15 million euros (16.45 million U.S. dollars) has been approved by the Council of Ministers to allow the creation of these additional reception places, according to a statement by the Belgian Chancellery.

"In the last two weeks, the asylum applications have continued to rise so that we have to act quickly," said the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Theo Francken, in the statement.

Francken has invited various institutions to form a list with sites that could quickly receive some persons in short-term. Some sites may even be operational in two weeks.

According to the statement, there has been a "continuous" increase from the month of May, from 1,289 requests in April to 2,960 in July, which is "very much" above the monthly average during the asylum crisis of 2011 when it was 2,123 requests. Endit