Weekly political overview
A new political agreement gives police the right to use facial recognition on recorded video material. They can only use it to solve serious crimes. Why now? To stop the wave of “crime as a service,” where teenagers from Sweden are hired to commit crime in Denmark.
The Minister of Integration and Immigration is on an “inspiration trip” to Nauru (Oceania). The island has become famous for being Australia’s center for asylum seekers and it’s not always known for the best conditions. The Danish Minister of Immigration is intrigued by the idea of keeping asylum seekers out of the country while their case is being processed and would like to see if a similar model is possible for Denmark.
Updates from the political parties:
- The integration and immigration spokesperson from Socialdemokratiet (Social Democrats) wants Denmark to reconsider its membership in the Human Rights Convention. Why? The Supreme Court said that plans to repatriate an eight-year-old boy from a Syrian prison camp without his mother is a violation of human rights. Only the boy has Danish citizenship.
- Crisis in Moderaterne (Social Liberals). Again? The bane of newly formed parties is that they don’t have the chance to fully vet the people they put in front, so they often end up in unwanted scandals. What happened now? Some current and former employees of the party lodged a complaint with the Danish Working Environment Authority that the working environment is very poor and the management is “tyrannical.”
- The crisis took another turn when an internal letter from the member of Parliament, Jeppe Søe, was leaked in the BT newspaper, where he described the party as a “sexist clown bus.” Unsurprisingly, two days later, he resigned from the party and will continue as an independent in the Parliament.
- Why did he resign? He openly opposed the leadership plan from Lars Løkke Rasmussen to solve the poor working environment crisis and wanted an external investigation into the party.
- How will the party solve the problem? Hire a professional psychologist and set up a whistleblower scheme.
Focus
Former Danish citizens who lost their citizenship between 1993 and 2015 because they received citizenship in another country can have their case reopened thanks to a ruling from the European Court of Justice. Denmark will not take the initiative, so the people in this situation need to start the proceedings for individual assessment.
- This concerns people who lost their EU citizenship as a result of losing the Danish one. So, if you lost your Danish citizenship in favor of another EU citizenship, then this ruling doesn’t apply to you.
In the last 25 years, the Ministry of Equality has been moved 15 times. It started in 1999 in the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Housing. Since then it has been together with the Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Welfare, Ministry of Employment, Ministry of Climate and Energy, Ministry of Church, Ministry of Integration, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Fisheries, Ministry of Food, Ministry of Transport, and Ministry of Digitalization. Today, it is within the Ministry of Environment. It has never gotten the chance to be an independent ministry. In a way, you start to understand the decline of equality in Denmark, considering the ministry never gets the respect and attention it deserves.
