Hardline Denmark also wants to export refugees

While Britain’s plan to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda has provoked bemusement in much of Europe, it has been welcomed by Denmark, which appears poised to conclude a similar deal.

Since 2015, when more than a million asylum-seekers from Syria and elsewhere arrived in Europe, successive Danish governments of both right and left have introduced, or at least threatened to introduce, headline-grabbing measures to dissuade migrants by making the wealthy and otherwise liberal Scandinavian country seem as unwelcoming as possible.

Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democratic Prime Minister, has said her aim is to reduce the number of people seeking asylum in her country to zero.

One law, passed in 2016, stipulated that newly arrived asylum-seekers should hand over jewellery, gold and other valuables to help pay for their stay. Other measures included labelling areas with high numbers of immigrants “ghettos” and limiting the number of “non-Westerners” who could live in them.

Denmark gave refuge to 30,000 Syrians but ­became the first country in Europe to decide that it was safe for some to return to their homeland. But it has been unable to send them back because it does not have diplomatic relations with Damascus. Caught in legal limbo, they have been sent to so-called expulsion centres.

“Everything the Danish state has done for the past 20 years is about deterrence,” Michala Bendixen, the founder of Refugees Welcome, said last year at one such centre in rural Jutland.

“It is about scaring people away from Denmark. “The message is: you should stay in Germany or France or wherever. Everywhere else is better than here.”

Denmark, like Britain, has been negotiating with Rwanda for months but was pipped to the post by last week’s announcement by British Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The British plans are modelled on Australia’s offshore processing of asylum-seekers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

Though stressing that a deal has not yet been agreed on, ­Mattias Tesfaye, Ms Patel’s opposite number in Copenhagen, said his talks with the Rwandan government included “a mechanism for the transfer of asylum-seekers and should ensure a more ­dignified approach than the criminal ­network of people smugglers that currently characterises ­migration across the Mediterranean”.

Mr Tesfaye, whose father ­arrived in Denmark as a refugee from Ethiopia, has welcomed Britain’s deal as “a step in the right direction”.

Denmark’s policy, which is in stark contrast with the liberal stance of neighbouring Sweden, began under the right-of-centre minority government of Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who came to power in June 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis and depended on the right-wing Danish People’s Party for his majority.

One of his government’s more controversial proposals was to use Lindholm, a tiny ­island a few kilometres off the coast, to house 100-150 migrants who had served sentences in Denmark for murder, rape and other serious crimes but were ­refusing to ­return to the countries of their birth. The island, immediately dubbed Alcatraz, had been used as a research centre into infectious animal diseases and was contaminated with traces of BSE, foot-and-mouth disease and swine fever. With the locals on the mainland opposed and the bill for decontamination put at 759 million krone ($162m), the plan was shelved.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Ms Frederiksen, whose centre-left coalition replaced Mr Rasmussen’s government in 2019, embraced her predecessor’s policies, which go down well with her party’s working-class voters. The measures have provoked controversy – and seen the country hauled before the European Court of Human Rights. It does, however, appear to have reduced numbers: only 1547 people ­applied for asylum in 2020, a 57 per cent fall from 2019 and the lowest number since the 1990s.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/hardline-denmark-has-spent-20-years-deterring-migrants/news-story/a411817d9ad011affdde990def5aafa0