International flights remain suspended at Nuuk airport – the new air travel hub in the capital of Greenland – after the Danish Transport Agency refused last week, for the second time, to reinstate international services.

Denmark revoked Nuuk airports international flight authorization in mid-August.

At the time, the Agency said in a news release, published in Danish, that Nuuk airport doesn’t meet “the necessary high level of security in the security area.”

“As airport security involves a high level of confidentiality, we cannot go into detail about which security measures are currently lacking,” said the Agency’s deputy director Christian Vesterager.

It is now more than a month since there has been an international flight to the airport.

On Monday, the chairman of the Greenlandic government, Múte B. Egede, and Greenland’s minister for housing and infrastructure, Hans Peter Poulsen, summoned the board chairman and deputy chairman of Greenland Airports, according to a press release from Naalakkersuisut.

“The current conditions are unacceptable, and we expect further focus to be placed on progress,” said Egede.

The Danish Transport Agency is due to visit the airport for an inspection in early October, according to DR.

“We are working intensely and focused on getting a handle on what is missing, so that the international flights can start again, and we once again deeply regret the inconvenience this causes for our customers and passengers,” said Greenland Airports director Jens Lauridsen last week.

Domestic flights are not affected.

In 2018, Denmark financed half of the airports in Greenland rather than allow the bid from China Communications Construction Company to build them.

Read next: Denmark will chair the Arctic Council in 2025 – what is it up against?

It’s not only China eyeing Greenland: in 2019, Donald Trump brazenly stated that the US should buy Greenland. This was swiftly rebuked by Greenland with the words “we’re open for business, not for sale”.

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.