Six failed asylum-seekers set fire to their detention centre cell in Vienna overnight and had to be hospitalised, Austrian police said Saturday. Asylum claims filed by the five Afghans and one Iranian man had been rejected and they were awaiting deportation. Police initially spoke of a collective suicide attempt but later downplayed that premise. “We think the men wanted to …
Immigration Minister Inger Støjberg on Thursday defended the success of a programme that allows refugees to take short-term jobs at an apprentice salary level and vowed that the scheme would continue despite the misgivings of the Danish People’s Party. Støjberg spent part of Thursday at the Aarhus software company CloudPartners, where two refugees have become the first to have successfully …
Paris and Berlin are looking to create a European centre for the fight against religious radicalisation, the French and German interior ministers said on Wednesday. “We have decided to propose a working group for fighting and preventing radicalisation,” French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux told a news conference in Paris. “We will take the common initiative of proposing a European …
The Conservative and Danish People’s parties say that people awarded citizenship in the Scandinavian country must be required to shake hands. New rules require people who have been awarded Danish citizenship to take part in ceremonies in their local municipalities. Participants at the ceremonies are required to sign a document promising to respect Danish values. That must be considered to …
A 46-year-old Moroccan asylum seeker has been sentenced to 13 years in prison in Vienna for the attempted murder of his roommate at an asylum centre in Simmering. In his defence the man said that he thought the 27-year-old Syrian man and a group of other men were planning to rape him. He told the jury that he had been …
Denmark has an undisclosed agreement with Somalia to return individuals to the Northeast African country, according to reports. The agreement provides for up to 12 people to be returned to Somalia by Denmark annually, Politiken reported last year, but it has not been officially confirmed and details of individual cases have not been disclosed. But one of the deportations that …
An apprenticeship scheme for refugees introduced by Denmark’s government in 2016 now has 1,500 participants, the ministry for immigration has announced. Introduced by minister Inger Støjberg’s Ministry of Immigration and Integration in 2016, the ‘basic integration education programme’ (integrationsgrunduddannelse, IGU) provides opportunities for refugees to take short-term jobs at an apprentice salary level of between 50 to 120 kroner (6.70–16 …
New rules introduced on July 1st mean that people who have lived in Denmark for over three years will have to pay for interpreters if required during medical treatment. The new rule means that patients that have lived for Denmark for more than three years and do not have the necessary Danish language skills to speak to medics will be …
