horizons hr-danube
Danish far-right resists EU immigration policies
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News | 3/13/2011 12:00:00 AM | SAMUEL DOVERI VESTERBYE
Danish nationalists have been angered by talk of bringing the country’s legal procedures toward immigrant families into line with EU policies, saying that recent EU rulings on the matter infringe on Denmark’s sovereignty. Right-wing politicians say Denmark should be allowed to make its own immigration laws
Efforts to bring Denmark’s legal treatment of immigrant families in line with European Union policy directives and European Court of Justice, or ECJ, court rulings are drawing ire from Danish nationalists.
Current EU policy, which stipulates that migrant workers be allowed to bring family members into their country of residence, has come under attack in recent weeks from far-right politicians calling for Denmark to take hold of its own sovereign foreign policy.
“We’re seriously hoping that this EU rule will be changed to allow for Denmark’s sovereign foreign and migration policy to continue with tighter migration laws,” said Martin Henriksen, Parliamentarian for the right-wing Danish People’s Party.
A European Council Directive from 2003 on the right to family reunification established the “right to family reunification by third country nationals residing lawfully in the territory of the member states” in a move that was aimed primarily at immigrants working in the EU who were separated from their spouses and family. A subsequent directive in 2004 further developed EU policy on the issue. These directives, along with a separate deal agreed upon in the 1980s between Turkey and the EU which specifically addresses the rights of Turkish migrant workers, which Danish judicial experts refer to as the “Ankara-deal,” outline a general EU policy on the issue.
Some have called for the “Ankara-deal” to be scrapped.
“Denmark must leave the Ankara deal,” Karen Jespersen, a former minister for the governing party and a current parliamentarian in the integration committee, told the press. “I would like to see if this deal will really have such impacts and understand whether there is a way out. As the situation is right now, we should take such evaluations very seriously.”
[HH] Denmark no longer exempt
The 2003 EU directive explicitly states that its policies do not apply to the United Kingdom, Ireland or Denmark. Recently, Denmark’s status as exempt from this directive has come under attack in recent years after rulings from the ECJ, and, most recently, a Danish court ruling.
“Our own parliament should be deciding foreign policy and our laws about migration, not any other entity and especially not an EU deal with Turkey from the 1980s,” Henriksen told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in an interview. “We need to be sovereign and decide for ourselves as these mistakes could have negative consequences for Danish culture and society.”
In a 2008 ECJ case, Case C-127/08, it was found that the 2004 EU directive that protected the right of migrant workers to bring their families into the country had no exceptions among EU member states, and that the directive “precludes legislation of a member state which requires a national of a non-member country who is the spouse of a union citizen residing in that member state but not possessing its nationality to have previously been lawfully resident in another member state before arriving in the host member state, in order to benefit from the provisions of that directive.”
A 2010 ECJ ruling reached a similar conclusion, and has been cited as evidence that the EU wishes Denmark to scrap its current legislation on immigrants. In the last two weeks, in what came as a surprise to some observers, a Danish court upheld the rulings of the ECJ despite protests from anti-immigration voices.
[HH] Following Brussels’ lead
While several politicians expressed concern about the ECJ ruling in 2010, experts note that Denmark is extremely unlikely to overturn the ruling or change the EU agreement as ministers could face accusations of “administrative wrongdoing.”
“It is extremely unlikely that Denmark [can] change this ruling, seeing that it was decided by European member states at an EU level, making it practically impossible to change unless Denmark convinces all the member states,” Marlene Wind, an expert on EU juridical matters at the University of Copenhagen, told the Daily News. “More likely it is a political scandal about how the current government may have turned a blind eye to their European obligations while implementing unlawfully stringent migration laws.”
Since 2002, Denmark’s conservative government has tightened migration laws through the implementation of what is commonly known as the “24-years rule” with support from the Danish People’s Party. The “24-years rule,” which took effect in 2002, stipulates that anyone who is under the age of 24 cannot marry a foreigner and bring them back to Denmark with the purpose of getting them citizenship. While the rule was initially billed as an attempt to prevent migrant workers from bringing “slave wives” from developing nations, particularly Pakistan, critics of the rule claim that such justification is just a pretense for dramatically restricting migrant family reunions.