Children's weak legal position

Children of foreign parents are disadvantaged on several areas in Denmark. This applies to children in the asylum system (with or without parents), stateless children, and children of refugees and immigrants with a residence permit. Their social and economic rights are far inferior to children with Danish parents.

International conventions protect all children

All children on Danish territory, regardless of whether they are Danish or foreign citizens, fall under several of the international conventions to which Denmark has acceded. The most important is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but children are also protected under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UN Refugee Convention, the two UN conventions on statelessness, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
 
The most important article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires the state to consider the "best interests of the child", in other words: what is best for the child. Article 3 states: “In all actions concerning children, whether taken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
 
Several other conventions mention that special consideration must be given to children, as they are more vulnerable and rarely have responsibility for their own situation. Time and attachment are also particularly important factors for children.

Denmark's consideration of the best interests of foreign children

To put it mildly, the Danish Parliament and civil servants have not placed much emphasis on the "best interests of the child" over the years when it comes to children of asylum seekers, refugees and other foreigners, as well as unaccompanied refugee children. Denmark signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991 but has never implemented it in Danish law. It was not until 2012-13 that the best interests of the child were written directly into one of the paragraphs concerning rejected asylum seekers. But still, no specific assessment was made during the case processing. This was proven by a number of specific cases featured in the media in 2014, some of them from Refugees Welcome.
 
However, in recent years there has been a positive development, where children's actual attachment has been given greater importance. Read more in the article "When does a child's ties to Denmark trigger a residence permit?".

Examples of the poor legal position for children with foreign parents

Danish immigration legislation clearly places children at a disadvantage in many ways compared to their native Danish peers, despite some recent improvements:

Predominance of poor refugee children
The low unemployment benefits targeted at refugees mean that a large proportion of children with a refugee background grow up in poverty. This was documented by both the Rockwool Foundation and the Danish Institute for Human Rights already in 2019, and the new social benefits reform will reduce the income for a larger group in 2025. It is harmful for successful integration, and it greatly increases the risk that the affected children will later in life end up without an education, may develop an addiction or commit crimes. Socio-economically, it is a great loss for society when refugee children are brought up in poverty.

Refugee children get smaller child benefits check
Newly arrived refugee families are not entitled to full child family benefits until they have stayed legally in Denmark for 6 years. The amount increases gradually year by year, so that in the first year you only get paid 1/6 of what a normal Danish family gets per child. A direct financial penalty that hits the children extra hard because these are families where the parents typically have not found work yet and only receive the very low benefits for newcomers.

A childhood on temporary stay
Children born and raised in Denmark by foreign parents only have a temporary residence permit unless their parents obtain Danish citizenship before they turn 18. The paradigm shift 2015-2019 has given many children and young people a constant fear of losing their temporary residence in Denmark, which Save the Children has documented. 54,000 Danish-born children must apply for citizenship when they turn 18. Although access to permanent residence and citizenship for young people is slightly easier than for adults, there are still many who only obtain it when they are at the end of their twenties – or have to give up altogether. Life with a foreign passport is very difficult if you want to travel on vacation or study abroad – and you do not have the right to vote, even if you have turned 18. The Danish Institute for Human Rights highlighted the problem in the report “Foreigner in your own country?” in 2021, and the association “Os udenfor” was formed by young Danes without citizenship.

Stateless children raised in Denmark
Although Denmark has signed the two UN Conventions on Statelessness and committed to reducing statelessness, Danish citizenship is only granted to stateless children if they were BORN in Denmark (and the parents are not informed of the special access). For example, if the child came here at the age of 2, the same requirements apply as for everyone else. Furthermore, the authorities have no precise guidelines for assessing statelessness. There are more than 8,000 formally stateless children in Denmark, most of them were born in Syria, Lebanon, Bhutan and Myanmar. UNHCR has criticized Denmark harshly on this area.
 
Education or permanent residence?
Young people with foreign parents are often forced to make an unfair choice between the education they want or working in an unskilled job for 3 ½ years, which gives them access to permanent residence. The Danish Parliament has repeatedly voted down proposals to equate education with work, as the rules have been in the past. Today, even periods of paid internship do not count.

School and education – not for everyone
Children in asylum centres have only limited access to school and education. At first, they must attend special asylum schools with very limited teaching, and their parents must find a place in a local primary school themselves when the asylum school assesses that they are ready for it. If they reach the 9th grade level, they do not have the right to continue in upper secondary education. The children also do not have the right to mother tongue tuition
 
Older children do not need their parents
Children over the age of 15 have a very limited right to family reunification with their parents, even though they are by definition children until they turn 18. The authorities' claim that a 15-year-old must be considered able to manage without their parents contrasts with the fact that Danish children on average move away from home when they are 21-22 years old.
 
3-month deadline also affects the child
When applying for a child to be reunited with his or her family, the application must be made within 3 months of the child being born or the parent residing here having been granted a residence permit. Few people are aware of this and are not informed about it in advance. If the deadline is exceeded and this leads to a refusal, the child's right to a life with his or her parents is affected.
 
Humanitarian residence does not apply to children
After a refusal of asylum, you can apply for humanitarian residence if you are seriously ill or severely disabled. However, the very narrow criteria do not include diagnoses that are seen in children. Our count of permits in the period between 2011 and 2013 showed that the cases included a total of 37 children, but that only one permit was granted with the child as the main person (kidney transplant).

Congratulations on turning 18, now you must return to Afghanistan!
If an unaccompanied refugee child is granted a residence permit because the child has no network in their home country, the residence permit expires when the child turns 18, and there is virtually no chance of having it extended, because the stay will typically only have been 2-5 years which is not considered sufficient attachment. Unaccompanied minors are also moved to adult centres, if they reach the age of 17 during the asylum procedure.
 
Deportation centres are destructive to children's health
It has been well documented since the 1990s that children are mentally damaged by living in the asylum system for several years. Yet, approximately 100 children lived for a number of years in the Sjælsmark deportation centre in completely miserable conditions in order to pressure their parents to return home, and a psychological report from the Red Cross caused a great stir in 2019. Although the families with children were moved to Avnstrup under slightly better conditions after massive public protests, the children did not fare noticeably better, as the Red Cross's follow-up study from 2022 showed.

My mother lives in a deportation centre
A parent can be forced to live in a deportation centre, even though they have children with legal residence in Denmark, who may live on the other end of the country (see case on page 48 of our report on rejected and deportation centres). Only children with Danish citizenship, and thus EU citizenship, have a clear right to have both their parents with them as a consequence of an EU ruling from 2022.

Young children accompany their mothers during interviews
Many mothers go through the long asylum interviews with a small child on their lap, which is harmful to both the case and the child. Not enough is being done to solve this problem. Until about 5 years ago, asylum-seeking parents were not asked about their children's possible motives for asylum (e.g. female genital mutilation, forced marriage or risk of becoming a child soldier), and children did not have their own ID number in the asylum system.