JAKARTA - Denmark's controversial decision to exterminate 15 million minks, under the pretext of preventing the spread of the mutated COVID-19, has been declared illegal.
Conditions that lead to a 'game' of blame involving top politicians. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is at risk of facing national court over 'Minkgate' which is seen as one of Denmark's biggest political scandals of modern times.
All text messages from the days when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made the controversial decision to slaughter all of the country's mink stocks have been deleted, TV2 reports.
The decision to kill 15 million minks to stop the mutating variant of COVID, for fear of interfering with the vaccination process sparked controversy, deemed unconstitutional because Danish law does not support the killing of healthy animals.
A special commission set up earlier this year to investigate the case has collected more than a million documents and emails to map out the course of events.
The commission requested the prime minister's text messages from the days on which the decision was made, but they appear not to be available. Mette Frederiksen staff said messages will be deleted automatically after 30 days.
Meanwhile, according to law professor Frederik Waag from the University of Southern Denmark, this condition can be criminal in itself.
"If you delete everything without considering journaling, it becomes illegal, because text messages are generally considered normal mail," Waag told the Extra Bladet newspaper.
Following the media uproar, Mette Frederiksen promised that the ministry would try and recover deleted text messages and review its guidelines.
However, Danish Radio obtained a text message showing how Frederiksen's right-hand man, Foreign Minister Barbara Bertelsen, pressured former department head at the Ministry of Food Henrik Studsgaard to let former minister Mogens Jensen get involved in this affair. According to Radio Denmark, the messages remained intact on Studsgaard's phone, but were deleted on Bertelsen's phone.
"Your minister's only chance to turn this around is to accept it sincerely and wholeheartedly. Any vestiges of previous real attempts to pass it on to others, including the government at large and thus the prime minister, will hit it harder", Berthelsen wrote in one of the messages, as quoted by Radio Denmark.
During this fall and early winter, a total of 61 interrogations will be held with ministry employees, government officials, industry representatives and ministers. Last on the list, the prime minister himself will testify on December 9.
"Job descriptions are written based on the idea of the 'prime suspect', namely the prime minister", said Michael Gøtze, professor of administrative law at the University of Copenhagen, in early October.
Last year, the drama again took on a bleak plot twist, after the mink buried in a shallow grave one meter into the ground, began to swell with gas and pierce through, sparking a gruesome joke about a "zombie mink".
This year, the work of excavating and removing the last rotten mink from their makeshift grave has been completed. Experts will now investigate whether the carcass caused environmental damage and whether further action is needed.
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