Inside the fight against Denmark’s ‘straight up racist’ housing law

Copenhagen, Denmark – Under a graffiti-covered bridge in Norrebro, a multicultural, trendy district of the Danish capital, Sara touches her hijab.

“I am Muslim. The way the government and the media speak, they see me as not Western,” says the 46-year-old, who was born and raised in Denmark and asked not to use her real name.

She believes the country’s so-called “ghetto law” is a way of cracking down on Muslims, who account for little more than 4 percent of the population.

On November 23, Denmark’s Supreme Court is due to rule on a case that could shape the future of that law, which can force the sale, demolition or conversion of nonprofit homes in areas where more than half of residents are classed as “non-Western”.

In Denmark, nonprofit housing accommodates more than one million people and is open to all.

Seven families from the Nojsomhed estate in Helsingor, north of Copenhagen, are challenging their former landlord, Boliggarden, after the estate was put on the “ghetto list” in January 2020.

They argue that they were forced out because of where they or their parents come from.

‘A proxy for ethnic origin’

In his warmly lit, cosy office space in central Copenhagen, Eddie Khawaja, the families’ lawyer, told Al Jazeera that the case boils down to whether the evaluation is “neutral” and “detached from ethnicity elements or not”.

It is the first case to reach the Supreme Court since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled last December, in cases from Mjolnerparken, an estate in Norrebro, and another estate, that the “non-Western” categorisation could amount to ethnic discrimination, and left Danish judges to decide.

Lower courts had ruled against the families, finding that “non-Western” does not describe an ethnic group.

The Supreme Court, which heard the case over two days, must now weigh that against the EU ruling.

Khawaja, who presented his closing arguments to the court on Monday, said the EU ruling opened the way for judges to look beyond the law’s wording to how politicians talked about it. In his view, “non-Western” is “a proxy for ethnic origin”.

His clients are almost all employed, well educated, and none are criminals, he said. “They are part of the community with the wrong ethnicity.”

Even if the families lose against their landlord, Khawaja said, the court must still decide whether the criterion is neutral, which could affect every estate on the lists.

The law works through lists updated by the government on December 1 every year of what were once referred to as “ghettos” but are now named “parallel societies”.

‘We are not a ghetto’

When Denmark published its first official “ghetto list” in 2010, being on it felt “stigmatising” but it did bring money for social projects, said Helle Hansen, a gregarious night-shift care worker from Gellerup in Aarhus, one of the country’s largest nonprofit housing estates.

When the annual list was published, residents of newly named estates appeared on the evening news. “We are not a ghetto,” she recalled them saying.

Under the 2018 “parallel society” law, nonprofit housing areas with at least 1,000 residents, more than half of them “non-Western”, go on the list. They must also meet two of four criteria on unemployment, crime, education and income.

After five consecutive years on the list, the areas must cut nonprofit family housing to 40 percent by 2030, through sales, demolition or conversion.

In 2021, the Social Democrat-led government removed the word “ghetto” from the law.

“Ghetto areas” became “parallel societies” and “hard ghettos” became “transformation areas”, while a new list of “prevention areas” added estates where the “non-Western” threshold is 30 percent.

An estate with the same social problems, where half or fewer residents are “non-Western”, faces no such obligation.

Khawaja said that cutting crime and raising education, incomes and employment were good aims, “but we are just saying, fine, regulate on that”.

Instead, he argued, politicians had made ethnicity “a decisive factor”.

In Gellerup, seven blocks with 408 flats were marked for demolition, said Hansen, who is part of Almen Modstand, a grassroots movement against the “ghetto law”.

Residents voted against the plan, but the wider housing association overruled them.

‘A racial category in real time’

Under Statistics Denmark’s definition, “non-Western” covers anyone outside the EU and a short list of countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Amani Hassani, a Danish urban ethnographer and lecturer in politics and history at Brunel University London, said the criterion does something the social measures alone do not.

“What ‘non-Western’ does in Denmark is actually creating a racial category in real time,” she told Al Jazeera. “It is a question of ancestry,” she said, not citizenship.

What the category captures, she added, is “people who originate in non-white majority countries”.

‘Descendants of descendants’

Since 2020, Statistics Denmark has also published figures that separate out a third generation, which Hassani calls “descendants of descendants”.

Her grandparents came to Denmark as migrants.

“My family has been here for half a century,” she said. “The political class can speak all they want about how I am not Danish.”

Under the bridge in Copenhagen’s Norrebro district, traders work at a bustling market while students speed past on bicycles.

Sara believes religion is at the heart of the issue. “I am Muslim, and that is really what they see as non-Western,” she said.

Many people Al Jazeera spoke to said that the rhetoric used by politicians is ultimately directed at Islam.

Days after the housing law took effect, parliament adopted a resolution during a debate on the integration of Muslims, describing “parallel societies” where attempts are made to enforce Islamic customs at “the expense of Danish values”.

Ester Anker, a 27-year-old psychology student who lives in Norrebro, called the law “straight up racist” and said it was clearly aimed at Muslims. Politicians “haven’t even done a good job at hiding that fact”, she said.

‘A community of care’

Majken Felle, a 52-year-old teacher, has loved Mjolnerparken since she moved there in 2014.

For years, the list was little more than a label, she said. Then, from 2019, letters began landing in residents’ mailboxes urging them to accept “voluntary” rehousing.

Eviction notices followed, and she has since moved three times.

Yet the pressure also pulled neighbours together. Residents bound by a common cause got to know each other and met in the laundry rooms to swap what they knew about their rights, she said.

Felle speaks warmly of her former neighbours, many of them women from the Middle East who fled their countries young, raised children, and learned Danish, demonstrating, she said, resourcefulness and tenacity.

The government and housing associations underestimated many of those women, Felle said. They were supposed to just move away, but they ended up taking on the Danish state.

Hassani described the emergence of “a community of care”, where earlier arrivals help refugees navigate schools and public services.

“That’s what’s at risk. That’s what’s being dismantled here,” she said.

The estate has changed in character now, Felle said.

Most newcomers are young, mainly ethnically Danish students and expats, many from Argentina and France.

People stay for a couple of years, meaning the area has a more transitory nature. Residents do not invest in the community in the same way. Where neighbours once said hello, people now look at the ground, she said.

Mjolnerparken itself came off the list in 2023 after its population fell below 1,000, but it still has to complete its plan by the end of 2029, the housing ministry told parliament.

‘Remove the label’

A four-party coalition led by Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats has governed Denmark since early June.

Housing is now in the hands of Jacob Mark of the Socialist People’s Party, which voted for the law in 2018.

Even a win in court may not end it, Hassani warned.

The government could use “political acrobatics”, she said, to keep targeting the same communities without the category. “They’ll just remove the label, right?” she said.

Felle has the same fear.

“People cannot change who they are,” she said. “And if these estates are the target today,” she asked, “who is next?”