COPENHAGEN, Denmark
Denmark will be sending foreign nationals convicted in the country to serve their sentences in a Kosovan prison, the countries’ respective justice ministers agreed on Wednesday. Should both sides' parliaments give the accord the green light, the first inmates could be transferred to the Balkans as early as next year.
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| A view of the Detention Centre in Gjilan. |
Danish Justice Minister Nick
Haekkerup and his Kosovan colleague Albulena Haxhiu have signed off on a deal
that reserves some 300 cells in a Kosovan prison for Danish migrant convicts.
According to the scheme, inmates who are not Danish nationals will be serving
sentences meted out by Danish courts in a prison located in the Kosovan city of
Gjilan. The penitentiary facility will, however, first have to be refurbished
so that conditions in there are in line with those found in Danish jails.
After the inmates have served
their time, they will be deported back to their countries of origin.
The accord signed on Wednesday
was preceded by a preliminary agreement between Copenhagen and Pristina in
December 2021. The BBC reported at the time that Denmark would shell out €15
million annually for an initial period of five years. On top of that,
Copenhagen will reportedly help Pristina develop green energy in the Balkan
region in exchange.
The Danish justice minister
hailed the deal as “ground-breaking,” adding that it would help the
kingdom better manage its own “overcrowded prisons and will ease the
pressure on our prison officers.”
Haekkerup also noted that the
agreement “sends a clear signal to foreigners from third-party countries
who have been sentenced to deportation” that their “future is not in
Denmark and therefore you won't serve your sentence here.”
Commenting on the news to
Denmark’s Ritzau media outlet, the official expressed hope that the “practical
side of things can be ready in the first quarter of 2023.”
According to official data
cited by the media, the number of inmates in Denmark has ballooned by almost
20% since 2015, reaching over 4,000 in early 2021, and the Scandinavian
country’s prison system has been operating at capacity.
The deal struck between
Denmark and Kosovo comes weeks after the UK government revealed plans to send
asylum seekers arriving in that country to Rwanda, where they would await as
their applications are processed by British authorities. The Times reported at
the time that only male migrants would be flown to the central African nation.
In early April, British Home
Secretary Priti Patel traveled to the African country which had finalized
a “migration and economic development partnership” with the UK. It
followed previous failed attempts to strike similar deals with Albania and
Ghana.
It is, however, not clear at
this point if the holding facilities in Rwanda will be under UK jurisdiction.
The Labour opposition slammed
the scheme as an “unworkable, unethical and extortionate policy that would
cost the UK taxpayer billions of pounds during a cost-of-living crisis and
would make it harder, not easier, to get fast and fair asylum decisions.”
The United Nations refugee
agency, the UNHCR, too, expressed concern over London’s plans.
In 2020, Human Rights Watch
issued a report claiming that detainees in Rwanda suffer from arbitrary
detention, ill-treatment, and torture in official and unofficial facilities. - RT
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