2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) furthermore, the 2010 Wet Kraken en Leegstand (‘Squatting Law’) made squatting a criminal offense). 89 After another fourteen people who found themselves in the same situation moved into the tent, they decided to relocate and set up a tent camp elsewhere in Amsterdam, on an enclosed former schoolyard off a street that happened to be called the Notweg. (The name Notweg refers to the street’s origin as a private road where people other than the owners had a right of way; the likely meaning of the old Dutch word not is necessity, and its contemporary Dutch homophone nood means emergency. The campers would dispute the later eviction order’s reference to their camp’s location as a public road, arguing that the legal status of the yard was unclear and that it might be legitimately used by those in need). 90 Over the next couple of months, more than a hundred people joined them; they received tents, food, clothing and medical care from local supporters. At the Notweg, the campers decided to name themselves We Are Here, Wij zijn hier in Dutch.91 Although the Mayor of Amsterdam initially allowed the camp to exist as a ‘supporting part of the protest’, he issued an eviction order two months later, objecting, among other things, to the continuous expansion of the camp and to the fact that the protestors had failed to cooperate with attempts by the Municipal Health Service and the Ministry of Security and Justice’s Repatriation and Departure Service to find individual, temporary solutions for their lack of shelter. 92 Indeed, the point of saying We Are Here, and of demonstrating it through protesting, is for people whose presence has been delegitimised by the Dutch state to show that they are in fact present, that their presence cannot be dismissed as individual, exceptional and temporary problems that will all ultimately be resolved through deportation, and that they can speak and act together in meaningful ways. Of the 108 people who were arrested for disobeying the mayor’s eviction order, 98 were released, or geklinkerd, within twelve hours (the verb klinkeren refers to clinker bricks; it has become a common way of describing the act of putting irregularised people on the street, connoting harshness). 93 The fact that only two people were ultimately deported — one of them to Italy because, per the Dublin Regulation, 94 he was only allowed to submit an asylum request in the country where he had first entered the Schengen Zone — testifies to We Are Here’s ‘undeportability’. 95 A few days later, they took shelter in an empty church, aided by local squatters. The way in which they named the church and the numerous subsequent squats all over Amsterdam where they have taken shelter since, by adding the word vlucht (flight) to the building’s former name or function — 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 Wet Kraken en Leegstand [Squatting Law] (Netherlands) Law of 1 October 2010. Böhler Advocaten, Bezwaarschrift: Ontruiming Tentenkamp Wij Zijn Hier! [Notice of Objection: Evacuation of Tent Camp We Are Here] (Notice, 18 November 2012) <https://www.prakkendoliveira.nl/images/nieuws/2012/121118__bezwaarschrift_besluit_bw_amsterdam_ontruiming_wij_zijn_hier.pdf>. The group has been using both Dutch and English. ‘We Are a Political Group’, Interview with Yoonis Osman Nuur (Jonas Staal, Warns, 20 August 2013) in Jonas Staal, We Are Here (eds), New World Academy Reader #2: Collective Struggle of Refugees. Lost. In Between. (Basis voor Actuele Kunst 2013) 27 (‘We Are a Political Group’). The Municipal Health Service offered to hold ‘pre-screenings’ with refugees to ‘explore individual possibilities’ to spend the winter months in different homeless shelters outside Amsterdam; the offer for shelter of the Repatriation and Departure Service was conditional on a willingness to return. Letter from Mayor van der Laan to Böhler Advocaten, 16 November 2012. Spijkerboer (n 83). Regulation (EC) No 343/2003 [2003] OJ L 50/1 (‘Dublin Regulation’). ibid. 210