Citizens in other residential areas – including Mjølnerparken in Copenhagen and Vollsmose in Odense – have also protested against redundancies, the sale of public apartments and the demolition of apartment blocks.
The case from Elsinore was the first of its kind to affect the judicial system.
Initially, almost 100 families in the Nøjsomhed settlement were told to pack the moving boxes and leave their apartments.
25 households protested. Later, an agreement was made to move with 17 families, leaving eight families who refused to move.
Boliggården runs Nøjsomhed, which since 2018 has been on the government’s ghetto list. Boliggården wanted to remove the ghetto stamp, when in January the tenants were warned in seven steps that they should move.
The goal was to change the composition of residents in Thrift. This is what Bent Frederiksen, director of Boliggården, says.
This was to be done by renovating the affected flats and giving people over 50 with work priority to the new homes.
– We go after getting tenants in who are in jobs. Thus, we improve the revenue base of the department. I also do not think that in that case there are so many criminals moving in.
– We have not consciously looked at whether you have a non-Western background, he says.
The verdict on Friday was handed down without a court hearing. But earlier in the autumn, the housing association, the residents and the case’s lawyers met in the Court in Elsinore.
In court, the tenants’ lawyer argued that the housing association discriminated when it sent resignation letters to nearly 100 households.
Lawyer Morten Tarp argued that this is a matter of principle and that the ghetto law itself is discriminatory.
To substantiate that claim, the lawyer referred to the fact that the proportion of residents with non-Western backgrounds is a key criterion in assessing whether an area can be called a ghetto.
According to the lawyer, the ghetto law violates both Danish and international law. Stinne Lyager Bech supports this claim. She is the head of policy at the human rights organization Amnesty International Denmark.
– For us to see, there is clear discrimination in the legal text, and that does not change this specific judgment.
– There are more cases on the way, so we will see if there are other decisions later, she says.
On the other hand, Boliggården maintains that the dismissals took place on the basis of practical circumstances. The tenants were thus dismissed without regard to their ethnicity.
– In general, it applies to the whole of Nøjsomhed that there is an over-representation of residents with a non-Western background.
– No matter which ups and downs we chose to terminate, we could be accused of discrimination, says Bent Frederiksen.
The tenants have the opportunity to appeal the verdict to the high court.
Source: The Nordic Page