Denmark wants to bring some of its foreign prisoners to Kosovo in order to reduce the pressure on Danish prisons. The Social Democratic Justice Minister Nick Hækkerup announced that prison cells would be rented in Kosovo for 300 Danish prisoners, all of them deportation prisoners. Kosovo’s Ministry of Justice confirmed this to the Danish radio DR. The prison cells are rented to Denmark for ten years, in return the country receives 210 million euros. According to DR, the agreement is due to be signed next Monday.
The project sparked a great deal of debate in Denmark. Justice Minister Hækkerup referred to the threat of overcrowding in Danish prisons and promised that “Danish rules” should apply in prisons in Kosovo. The newspaper Politics spoke of another “bizarre initiative” by Copenhagen after the older plan to relocate all asylum seekers to an asylum center in North Africa: Again, according to the newspaper, the Danish government is going it alone “to collect symbolic points” in the foreigner debate: “Is there no longer any moral shame line at all?”
Civil rights activists particularly criticized the poor conditions in Kosovo’s prisons, where the Council of Europe’s Anti-Torture Committee CPT 2020 recently documented allegations of corruption and ill-treatment. They also asked how the state intends to guarantee the relatives living in Denmark a one-hour visit per week, which they are entitled to under Danish law: “Will the prison service then organize flights to Kosovo so that the children can continue to see their parents?” Asked the chairman of the child protection association Børns Vilkår, Rasmus Kjeldahl.
The Justice Minister said that Copenhagen had been negotiating in secret with Kosovo for a year. At the same time, the social democratic minority government secured a majority for the move in parliament: The plan is part of a penal reform package that the Conservatives and the Danish People’s Party want to approve, as well as the MPs of the Socialist People’s Party SF. The right-wing populist Danish People’s Party DF was particularly enthusiastic about the Kosovo plan and described the project as a “great victory”: DF had fought for a long time to ensure that foreigners were no longer incarcerated in Danish prisons, said DF spokesman Peter Skaarup. Because of their high standards, these are “like a holiday for many people”: “It’s a completely different matter if you have to serve your sentence in Kosovo, where the standards are somewhat different from those in Denmark.”
Improvements get lost in the debate
Justice Minister Nick Hækkerup, on the other hand, assured that they really wanted to ensure Danish standards: “You have to imagine it like in a Danish prison, only in a different country,” he said Politics quoted. “There will be a Danish administration and Danish rules apply.” In addition, the victims should be deported from Denmark after the end of their prison sentence anyway. “We anticipate this situation,” he said.
Critics of the project also referred to the example of Norway: Norway rented prison cells in the Netherlands in 2015, but then stopped the attempt in 2018 after harsh criticism from the Norwegian ombudsman who pointed out human rights violations.
It was almost forgotten in the debate that the reform package contains many other improvements both for the situation of prison officials and for the prisoners remaining in Denmark. For the left SF that was the reason to agree to the package. The red-green EL unit list, on the other hand, rejected the package outright because of the prisoner export to Kosovo: It was a shame, EL spokeswoman Rosa Lund said, that the Social Democrats had made an otherwise good thing through the Kosovo push “into a question of immigration policy” .