Proposition 51K2298

Projet de loi modifiant la loi du 19 février 1965 relative à l'exercice, par les étrangers, des activités professionnelles indépendantes.

General information ¶

Submitted by

PS | SP MR Open Vld Vooruit Purple Ⅰ

Submission date

Feb. 15, 2006

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

foreign national self-employed person

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

CD&V Vooruit Ecolo LE PS | SP Open Vld N-VA MR

Voted to reject

FN VB

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Discussion ¶

March 23, 2006 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

I refer to the written report.

This is a great way to be concise. Mr Depoortere has the word in the general discussion.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Minister, colleagues, the Minister of Middle-Earth intends to change with this bill the procedure for granting professional cards, for foreigners who want to settle in our country as self-employed. According to the minister, this is necessary because she is now facing long waiting lists. Therefore, the Minister calls this draft an administrative simplification.

At first glance, this seems to be a good and noble goal, but there is indeed a reverse side of the medal. Therefore, it is good to compare the old and the new procedures and draw our conclusions and political decisions from them.

The current system does not allow a negative decision to be made without prior consultation with the Council for Economic Research on Foreigners. The big problem — which I admit, Mrs. Minister — is, of course, that no deadlines are set in advance, so that of course waiting lists arise.

This bill proposes a two-step procedure. In the first instance, a person, in particular a delegated official, decides. In case of refusal, which is the second phase, the applicant may appeal to the Minister himself, who then in turn must seek advice from the Council for Economic Research on Foreigners.

I have two major concerns. As regards the first step of the procedure, I find it largely unreasonable to have a civil servant decide on files. Although the Minister in the committee listed a number of criteria that must be met, I remain hungry because there is no control over the decisions of this official. Also with the second phase, I have a fundamental problem. I think that colleague Pieters in the committee has calculated the number of months that run from the day that a applicant, in case of refusal, appeals to the minister. The foreigner has 30 days to file an appeal. The Council has four months to issue an opinion and the Minister has two months after receiving the opinion. This gives a total period of seven months.

Thus, the current draft actually only speeds up the approval procedure, but also here no time limits are set within which the official must make his decision, and the time limits up to seven months in the case of a negative decision in first instance.

Mrs. Minister, I can only conclude from this that there is no simplification of the current procedure, but indeed a easing. In other words, it will be easier for a foreigner to obtain a professional card. In the case of a negative decision in the first instance, everything in the appeal procedure is pushed back on the long track. It is more than likely that the foreigners will disappear in the illegality during this period.

The latter is not a fiction. Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out to my colleagues and the Minister an internal note of the city of Gent describing the problem of the phony self-employed. Currently there is a busy consultation ongoing between the city of Gent and the Cabinet of the Minister of Home Affairs in connection with the problem of the phony self-employed. This is about foreigners who are excluded from the right to registered labour and then take advantage of the possibility — and I literally quote — “to show the intention of wanting to establish themselves as self-employed. On this basis, they shall then obtain a residence permit with all the consequences thereof.”

This is at least strange to be called because already in the law of 19 February 1965 is written that a professional card may only be delivered to the foreigner who has a permit to reside or settle in Belgium. Therefore, the legal provisions do not eliminate the abuse of the situation.

For the Vlaams Belang group, this case will first have to be clarified before a new procedure is initiated. In fact, the present draft law takes this 1965 provision literally, which makes me conclude that the problem of the apparent independence remains unresolved.

Mr. Speaker, I will decide. First, this bill is, in our opinion, a mitigation that could lead to abuse, in particular in respect of self-employed foreigners who are not in good faith because in the first instance the delegated official must take the decision alone without control by an authority. In addition, a thorough screening in the first instance is avoided. Only if it is established that a foreigner is staying in our country without a permit, advice is requested from the Foreign Affairs Service. For us, a foreign candidate-self-employed, before and at an establishment on our territory, must be subject to a thorough examination.

Secondly, the fact — official documents of the city of Ghent confirm my argument — that the opposite is currently happening, in particular foreigners who demonstrate the intention to settle here as self-employed persons in order to obtain a residence permit in this way, indicates that a thorough investigation is necessary. This control of the so-called false self-employed is currently absolutely undermeasurable because the Social Inspectorate has insufficient resources, both financially and in terms of the workforce.

Third, the administrative simplification referred to by the Minister exists only in the case of a favorable decision for the delivery of a professional card. In an appeal procedure, there are no less than seven months in which a decision must be taken. This does not appear to be an immediate indication of an administrative simplification.

For these reasons, we propose that the current procedure be ⁇ ined, but with the introduction of deadlines. The present draft law presents the risk of being abused by malafide foreigners who want to settle here as self-employed without a thorough investigation being conducted.

The Flemish Interest Group will therefore vote against the present bill.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Minister, colleagues, with our CD&V group, we approved this bill in the committee, after it was indeed removed from the program law and was submitted as a separate draft. It took two months before this bill was submitted to the House, which was previously registered as an amendment to the Generation Pact and was converted into a bill at eleven o’clock. It was important that we could work with an opinion from the State Council, which was very useful, and that there was also a lively discussion in our chamber committee, while at the time of the discussion of the Generation Pact everyone would have voted dishonestly according to the advice of the government. This would have been approved without any discussion.

I think it was right that we could discuss it. This is not simply easy to grant, renew or renew a professional card. For this, the necessary research needs to be done to allow bonafide self-employed foreigners to come to work in our country.

It is necessary to have knowledge of their capacity, their background and the honesty of the intentions with which they come to this country. I agree with what my colleague has just said. The procedure is not simplified in terms of deadlines. The procedure is quite long, but if it is a good procedure, I have no problems with it. Our conclusion is that this design is not a simplification in terms of deadlines, but when everything is done correctly and everything is thoroughly examined, we will still be able to work with a system in which we are sure that we are only dealing with bonafide self-employed who want to settle here. This is our goal and therefore we have opted for a serious investigation that must be carried out by the official of the Minister and, if necessary, by an external body, namely the Council for Economic Advisory.

Finally, I would like to draw the attention of the members of the committee present to the fact that we are constantly facing a recurring fact in our committee for business. I am talking about the incredible blamage of the legislative texts. The Dutch translation of the ultimate bill has received eight corrections from the Chamber’s legal services on just four articles and two pages, not only legal comments, but above all comments on translations. We learn to live with it, Mr. Speaker, but if you ask me, this is not healthy. The government should do a better job in this area.

You are right about legality. I remind the Chamber that we expanded this service a few years ago. It was not easy. We agreed that there was a time interval between the legislative corrections and the final vote. There was a period, Mrs. Pieters — some time ago — that the Belgian Staatsblad was full of errata. I find this unacceptable.

I am very attentive to all these retail, but sometimes important corrections. I wrote to the Prime Minister four weeks ago to draw his colleagues’ attention to the fact that it is hard to accept — I see the Deputy Prime Minister, who possesses a genuine parliamentary motivation — that we were given texts in which sometimes ten, fifty, or a hundred observations of the legistic nature of our services could be found. Even better, if we have seen it, it does not require an erratum in the Belgian Staatsblad. Madame, I insist: you have of administrations, of collaborators. You know that it is not always easy to translate and text legislative of compromise of political order, it is normal. Life is a delicate thing! However, Monsieur le premier ministre, légistiquement, j'ai encore rappelé la lettre: you tiens à ce que cela soit exemplaire. Mrs. Peters, I thank you for quoting this. It gives me the opportunity to send the Prime Minister a letter of remembrance. In my letter, I also sent a list with dozens of comments on texts that were not polished. I am not talking about the content, but about the form. I think the room in this should be on its lines.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to note that you spoke longer than I did.

Mrs, you were dealing with the bottom of the matter, while I was dealing with the form.

I will be very brief. We had the opportunity to discuss this in the committee.

I have to say that this project is not versoepeling, but is a vereenvoudiging. De vreemdeling moet ten eerste de vergunning krijgen om in Belgium te stay. The first criterion is and remains the fact of obtaining the first residence permit in Belgium. We have set strict deadlines not to ease but to facilitate grant applications.