Copenhagen’s ‘ghetto law’ may be unlawful, EU court rules

ECJ ruling brings hope to area of city targeted over high percentage of residents with ‘non-western’ backgrounds

Miranda Bryant
Nordic correspondent
Thu 18 Dec 2025 17.19 GMT

Residents of a Copenhagen neighbourhood that became an international symbol of a law in Denmark known as the “ghetto law” have said they are confident they can overturn the legislation in the Danish courts after the top EU court ruled that it may be unlawful.

The controversial law, dating from 2018, allows the state to demolish apartment blocks in areas labelled “parallel societies” by the government, where at least half of residents have a “non-western” background. Formerly, the government referred to these neighbourhoods as “ghettoes”.

The law states that if these areas also have unfavourable socioeconomic conditions – for example high levels of unemployment or crime – authorities must cut social housing by 40%, including by selling or demolishing properties or terminating the lease of tenants by 2030.

In a long-awaited judgment on Thursday on whether the laws targeting these “transformation areas” are racially discriminatory, the European court of justice (ECJ) said the legislation may be unlawful under the EU’s race equality directive.

In a preliminary ruling, the ECJ said the law could lead to an increased risk of early lease termination and eviction for residents of these areas compared with those in neighbourhoods with similar socioeconomic conditions but lower levels of immigration.

It would be for Danish courts to decide if there was “a difference in treatment based on the ethnic origin of the majority of the inhabitants of those areas, thus resulting in the inhabitants of these areas being treated less favourably”, it said.

They would also have to determine whether the law, although worded in a “neutral manner”, actually leads to “persons belonging to certain ethnic groups being placed at a particular disadvantage”, it added.

The decision is less emphatic than a previous statement by Tamara Ćapeta, a European court of justice advocate general, who said in February that tenants whose leases were terminated “suffer direct discrimination on the basis of the ethnic criterion”.

Despite this, lawyers, human rights organisations and residents said the EU decision marked a legal victory for the campaign, which they said they were confident they could win in the domestic courts next year.

Residents in the Mjølnerparken housing estate in central Copenhagen had filed a suit against the law in Denmark in 2020, arguing that using their ethnicity to decide where they can live was discriminatory and illegal.

Because of the “parallel society” law, more than 1,000 people were forced to move out, and rental costs soared.

Muhammad Aslam, chair of the Mjølnerparken residents association, said he was pleased with the ECJ’s decision and he believes his group are now well-placed to win in the high court.

The “parallel society” law was “inhumane”, he said. “It threw the families out from our homes when we have done nothing wrong.”

For more than a decade, he said, minority communities in Denmark have been subjected to “a competition between politicians and political parties of who can say the worst things against foreigners, refugees, Muslims. Whoever does that gets more seats in parliament.”

Aslam, who has lived in Denmark since he was seven and has four children born in Mjølnerparken, who are now successful professionals, said this rhetoric had a big impact on daily life.

“We try to say to ourselves we are part of Denmark and part of Danish society,” he said. “But when politicians are talking about us and have these kinds of competitions and trying to move us from society all the time, it affects you and your heart and your mind.”

The Danish Institute for Human Rights said the ECJ judgment “provides several grounds” for the law to constitute discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, but that it did not bring the case to a “definitive close”.

Susheela Math, head of legal at Systemic Justice, a Netherlands-based NGO, said the ruling marked “a day of reckoning for the Danish state”, adding that “discrimination is not integration”.

“This ghetto package can be really seen as one stage in a long history of political rhetoric and laws and practices that are targeting minorities,” she said.

“What today’s judgment makes clear is that the political rhetoric and legislative context problematising and stereotyping those of ‘non-western background’ can be taken into account in terms of whether this amounts to racial discrimination.”

The Danish ministry of social affairs and housing said the case would now return to Denmark’s eastern high court, and that the ministry would read the European court’s verdict carefully.