Denmark’s Ministry of Immigration and Integration has placed processing of almost all citizenship cases on hold, it said in a short statement published recently on its website.
Citizenship case processing was paused following the announcement of the general election, which takes place on March 24th.
“Processing of cases will be resumed when there is clarity over which conditions will apply” for citizenship, the ministry stated.
“The Ministry of Immigration and Integration will not generally process applications for Danish citizenship until clarity comes after the election” on conditions which will apply in future, it said in the statement.
A number of narrow exceptions apply to the wide-ranging suspension.
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The Local has been in contact with the Ministry which was unable to give further comment on the situation because of the upcoming election, but provided explanation of the information contained in the existing press statement.
Applicants for citizenship via naturalisation must meet a predefined set of criteria to be included on naturalisation bills, which are usually tabled in parliament twice yearly.
These bills need a parliamentary majority to proceed, which normally means a group of parties (this can be a combination of government and opposition parties) has an agreement in place to support them.
The group of parties which is in agreement to vote through citizenship bills is highly likely to change after the election, partly because several right-wing parties have left the existing group during the current term, meaning it is unlikely to still have a majority after the vote on March 24th.
This makes the likelihood of a new citizenship voting group or forligskreds after the election high, so new criteria for citizenship are likely to be demanded and eventually implemented by parties in this new group after the election (notwithstanding the unlikely event that the outgoing government wins the election and continues in its current form).
Any new criteria can be applied to ongoing (verserende in Danish) applications and as such, applications which may have qualified for inclusion on a naturalisation bill before the election would have to be reassessed. This is essentially a retroactive application of new conditions to citizenship applications which have already been submitted.
For the ministry to resume processing applications, a new group of forligskreds parties must agree on new conditions (or, hypothetically, to retain the existing ones) and pass them into law, redefining the criteria that must be met for any applicant to be included on a naturalisation bill.
Because citizenship is an important area of lawmaking, it is reasonable to expect it to be given high priority by a new government and parliament and it's therefore possible (but not certain) that the necessary steps could be completed by the summer, when parliament goes on recess. It's also possible that this might not happen until the autumn or late in the year.
While it's unusual for the ministry to stop processing citizenship cases because of an election, it can be deemed necessary if there's a high likelihood that the naturalisation bills will need a new group of parties behind them in order for them to pass parliament (the most recent time it happened was in 2005). In general, parliamentary bills can be blocked if there’s a majority against them, and wouldn’t be tabled if this was an expected scenario.
Any new conditions that might be proposed and implemented after the election could include individual screening of applicants. The outgoing government last year set up an expert panel to examine whether this new step could be added to the application process, but the work of the panel has been put on hold because of the election. It will be up to a new government to decide whether to continue it.
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