Can being ‘non-Western’ cost you your home in Denmark?

What happens when the country you were born and raised in classifies you as non-Western? Well, in Denmark it can cost you your home. Denmark classifies anyone with roots outside the EU as non-Western, with the exception of a handful of countries including Australia, Canada and the US. Under a 2018 law, formerly the Ghetto Law, the states with a non-Western majority that meet social criteria such as unemployment, and stay listed for years can be forced to sell or demolish homes. These used to be called hard ghettos. Last year the EU's top court said the rule could amount to ethnic discrimination. Denmark is actually creating a racial category in real time. Many neighborhoods that are targeted with the ghetto policies Thank you very much. are in fact Danish citizens. So it's not a question of legal citizenship. It is a question of ancestry. The targeted ancestry within the non-Western category are people who originate in non-white majority countries. Until about six years ago, they went back two generations. In 2020, there was a directive to update that. So now there's another category of descendants of descendants that are showing up in statistic that marks. In Copenhagen's Mjolnirparken, Apartment blocks housing many non-Westerners were sold to private investors in order to get the estate off a hard ghetto list. They are framing us actually. In the narrative, like the poorest neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants and women who are not allowed to work. I know that many of these women, they might have come as refugees or immigrants in their early twenties to Denmark. They had created this new network, supported their children, learned Danish, working hard. Many of my neighbors are highly underestimated by the General narrative. In 2020, seven families from Helsingør opened a case against their landlord after their estate was put on a ghetto list. The case was put on hold until last year, until the EU's court ruling. Behind me, Denmark's Supreme Court is now deciding whether families were evicted from their homes because of their ethnic background. I spoke to the family's lawyer after the hearing. They are. They are not criminals, they are working, they are educated, they do what one needs to do in a modern society, and they participate, but they are part of a community with the wrong ethnicity. Residents in these areas say they will continue to push back. We are still fighting the Danish state, and we are using what we can, namely our legal rights.