Denmark is the first country in Europe to tell substantial numbers of Syrian refugees to return home. While deportations have not yet commenced, over 400 Syrians from Damascus and surrounding areas have had their resident cards and right to work revoked in February 2019.
Few of those affected have taken the risk of returning to Syria on their own, where human rights organizations have lately reported torture and disappearances of returning refugees. However, they are under growing strain, and hundreds of people have fled Denmark in quest of asylum in other EU nations.
The Danish government, which has had one of Europe’s toughest stances on asylum and migration in recent years, defended its decision by citing a decrease in violence in Damascus and its neighboring suburbs.
The decision to cancel residency permits fits in with a wider trend in Europe of governments pursuing harsh measures to restrict access to asylum and diminish rights. Nearly 11 years after the Syrian war began, advocates and rights groups are concerned that Denmark’s decision is a foreshadowing of what is to come as more European countries choose to focus on the reduction in armed conflict when calibrating their asylum policies – rather than the ongoing human rights violations committed by the al-Assad regime and the continued threat they pose.
In light of this new changes in Denmark and around the EU, the German institute for Democracy and Development held a webinar with 2 human right activists from Denmark, to discuss the situation of refugees and the humanitarian crisis taking place there. Unfortunately, there was a technical problem with the recorded video of the webinar that prevented us from uploading it online. However, below is an edited and summarized script of the discussion.
Mrs. Gyvel says that with the corona virus crisis, we tend to forget about other humanitarian crises including migration. She underlined the fact that Denmark has become one of the first countries in the world with the strictest rules concerning migrants. Racism is unfortunately very dominant within the government. She finds the situation catastrophic. Having always worked with migrants she is now, like many other Danes, ashamed of her country. She would like for NGOs and the European Union to mobilize in order to improve the situation in Denmark. She also points out that more and more people in every city in Denmark are revolting and thus making demonstrations and raising their voices in support of migrants, but she thinks that this is not enough. She thinks that Denmark needs bigger and more influential actors to make the cause heard.
As for Mrs. Suzanne, she thinks that this situation is not bearable and that it is the reason why after having spent 10 years of her life in Denmark, she decided to leave the country. She feels scandalized by all the difficulties that migrants go through to obtain a residence permit. In spite of the 10 years she spent in Denmark, she has not yet managed to have the stability she wanted (she ran the risk of being sent back at any moment even with a residence permit) and was forced to leave.
She highlighted the precarious situation of migrants and particularly the situation of migrant parents. Denmark can withdraw the custody of the children from the migrant parents. The racism that foreigners face in Denmark is unprecedented.
Today, there are schools with only foreigners with no Danes in them. Foreigners have such a hard time to provide for themselves, to an extant that some women have to sell their bodies to survive. She wants the European Union and the world to mobilize in order to find a solution for this growing crisis in Denmark.
