Seven families from Helsingor, a coastal city north of Copenhagen, are currently facing their former landlord in Denmark’s Supreme Court. In a two-day hearing that began on Friday, they are arguing that they were forced from their homes because of where they or their parents originated.
The Disputed Housing Law
The leases of these families were terminated in 2022 under a 2018 law previously known as the “ghetto law”, which targets social housing estates where more than half of the residents are classed as “non-Western”. While the Danish government maintains that the legislation is aimed at promoting integration, rights groups have fought against the measures for years, arguing that they are discriminatory.
Eddie Khawaja, the lawyer representing the families, stated to the news agency AFP that the central issue is whether the criteria regarding the tenants’ origin is neutral or not.
Statistics Denmark defines “non-Western” as any country outside the EU, with specific exceptions including Andorra, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United States, and the Vatican State. As the UN Human Rights Office noted in 2020, this disproportionately affects Denmark’s non-white and non-European ethnic populations, extending even to descendants born in Denmark if neither parent holds a Danish citizenship born in the country.
Impact and Government Stance
The legislation operates through government lists released every December 1st, identifying “parallel societies” where more than 50 percent of residents are non-Western immigrants and descendants, alongside meeting criteria on unemployment, crime, education, and income. Areas remaining on the list for five years become transformation areas, requiring public family housing to be reduced to 40 percent by 2030.
Thousands of people are affected by these measures, with tenants’ associations estimating that about 11,000 individuals across Denmark will have to leave their homes by 2030. In Helsingor, landlord Boliggarden terminated leases at the Nojsomhed estate, affecting mostly tenants of foreign origin.
Riad, a 33-year-old plaintiff who withheld his family name, told AFP that the landlord did not want the estate labeled as a hard ghetto and forcibly moved residents out.
The Danish government introduced the rules to prevent the emergence of religious and cultural parallel societies. Although the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in December 2025 that an allegedly neutral criterion covering many origins could be linked to ethnicity, Danish judges must now determine if the non-Western criterion rests on residents’ ethnic origin and results in less favourable treatment.
Authorities must continue applying the law until the courts issue a final ruling, and no official date has been set for the Supreme Court verdict, though reports suggest it could be handed down later this month.
