European Court Tackles Danish Law Requiring Renovation of Housing Targeting Immigrants as Discriminatory

Illustration of housing in Copenhagen, Denmark, which tends to be vertical. (Pexels-Gije Cho)

JAKARTA - The policy of forced renovation of social housing in Denmark which targets areas with a majority of ethnic minority residents alias non-Western is considered discriminatory.

Quoting AN, this renovation rule is based on the Danish Law (UU) which was published in 2018. In the rules point, using ethnicity or non-Western origin as a criterion for social housing that is targeted.

After a long renovation, the rates offered for old residents will increase in line with market rental prices. This is to attract other more established prospective residents.

The Danish intervention is still questioned for its effectiveness and has the potential to displace thousands of social housing residents.

Residents and owners of social housing affected in Mjolnerparken, Copenhagen, have sued the Danish law in the Danish Court.

In 2020, they filed the lawsuit with the European Court. The Court's ruling will be announced this week.

The preliminary opinion of a senior lawyer of the European Court in February 2025 said that the Danish policy was a form of "direct discrimination."

Regarding this, social housing is usually vertical housing built by local governments or non-profit institutions for low-income people or vulnerable groups.

Danish law requires owners or those responsible for social housing, where more than half of the residents are "non-Western immigrants and their descendants", to renovate the housing.

The renovation in the regulation concerns demolition, rebuilding, changing the type of housing (for example, becoming housing for the elderly/youth), and increasing the rental price according to the market.

Social housing targeted in the law is defined as a ghetto or slum settlement by the Danish Government.

Denmark's controversial social housing policy is also known as "One Denmark without Parallel Communities: No Slums by 2030".

The Danish government has for decades been tough on immigration policies. They say the law aims to eradicate segregation and "parallel societies" in poor neighborhoods that often struggle with crime.

Residents of social housing in Mjolnerparken consider using ethnicity as a basis for determining where people can live to be discriminatory and illegal.

One of them is Aslam, a 58-year-old Pakistani-born transportation company owner. He admitted that he had lived in the housing since it was established in 1987.

He and his wife raised four children in a four-room apartment-style social housing. Their children are now working as lawyers, engineers, psychologists, and social workers.

"I who work alone and my children are all included in the negative statistics used to label our neighborhood as a 'ghetto', a parallel society," Asalam told AFP.

In Mjolnerparken, the owner of the social housing building has agreed with its residents since 2015 to renovate four apartment blocks. The effort is accelerating the transformation of the complex to comply with the new Danish law.

All residents - a total of 1,493 people in 2020 - had to be temporarily relocated so that four blocks could be renovated, said a representative of the residents' association, Majken Felle.

At the time, according to government data, 8 out of 10 residents in Mjolnerparken were considered "non-Western," including those from non-EU countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

In total, 295 of the 560 homes in the social housing in Mjolnerparken have been renovated, with two apartment blocks sold and replaced with market-rate rents that are unaffordable for social housing residents.

Experts say that as a result of this policy, around 11,000 people across Denmark will leave their apartments in social housing and find new housing elsewhere by 2030.

"Efforts to diversify the environment may indeed be well-intentioned. However, such diversification cannot be achieved by placing already disadvantaged ethnic groups in a less advantageous position," the European Court of Justice's prosecutor general said in February 2025.

"However, in the current situation, Danish law does just that," he continued.