The Danish Ministry for Immigration and Integration announced on Friday that it will wind back a residency scheme that grants protection to long-term asylum seekers in Denmark.
Today, asylum seekers in Denmark can be granted a residence permit after 18 months, if the Danish government has not been able to deport them.
The system is aimed at people who have been refused asylum by the Ministry for Immigration and Integration, but whose deportation is considered legally unachievable, or “hopeless”.
The ministry refers to these people as udsendelseshindret – meaning hindered from deportation.
The Ministry said that the Immigration and Integration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek will begin the process by submitting a bill to abolish the residence permit for udsendelseshindret for external consultation.
Where Denmark is forced by its international obligations to grant a residence permit – for example, because the person in question is seriously ill or has close family ties to persons living here – it will be possible to obtain a residence permit according to another provision, said the Ministry.
Dybvad Bek said that the current permit scheme is “expensive to administer” compared to the “very few” residence permits that it grants, and that he believed the abolition is “both reasonable and sensible”.
“It is about foreigners who have had their application for asylum processed according to all the procedural rules, but who do not have a need for protection. They have no right to be in Denmark.”
“I do not want anyone to imagine that this is a revolution in immigration policy. But in principle I think the change is the right way to go.”
“It is also one less scheme that has to be administered, and thus we save a little bit of redundant bureaucracy in this way. “
In the period from 2016 to and including the second quarter of 2024, 18 residence permits have been issued under the scheme, according to the Ministry.
