Copenhagen population growth projected, tax minister latest to criticise parking firms, professor comments on party’s plan to quit citizenship convention and more news from Denmark this Tuesday.
Copenhagen will need to build at least 77,000 new homes by 2060 with the number of single people and childless couples particularly projected to increase in the capital.
A new assessment from Copenhagen Municipality projects the city’s population to rise by 113,000 over the next 35 years, hence the need for close to 80,000 new homes to be built.
As well as singles and couples without children, a higher number of residents over 65 is expected.
The number of families with children will also go up but by a more limited amount of around 9,000, according to the municipality.
The Liberal party’s blockbusting announcement yesterday that it wants Denmark to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on Nationality only ‘half solves’ the problem the party says it wants to address, according to an expert.
Leaving the convention would give Denmark more power to expel dual nationals who are convicted of crimes, the Liberals argue.
“When you have a person who is a Danish citizen and they have committed a crime, and you want to deport that person, there are two obstacles to that,” Jens Elo Rytter, law professor at the University of Copenhagen, told news wire Ritzau.
As well as the Council of Europe Convention on Nationality, the European Convention on Human Rights must also be adhered to, he explained.
“If you leave the Europe Convention on Nationality, you’d remove the first obstacle because it gives you more freedom to remove people’s citizenship. But you must still account for that person’s human rights even though that person is no longer a citizen,” he said.
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The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) has fired a director who was convicted of drink driving, the organisation has confirmed.
Deputy CEO Thomas Bustrup was on Monday given a suspended 20-day prison sentence for driving under the influence of alcohol twice on the same day on the island of Bornholm in June.
In a statement, the powerful business organisation said it was letting Bustrup go due to the “overall extent of the case.”
“His actions are not compatible with DI’s values and we no longer have the necessary confidence [in him],” CEO Lars Sandahl said in the statement.
Private parking companies who use their access to Denmark’s vehicle registry, Motorregistret to issue fines to drivers may be doing so wrongly, the Tax Minister Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen has suggested.
The opaque methods used by the companies to issue fines has also been criticised by Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen.
Parking companies are allowed to access the data registry but that is a privilege which they may be using incorrectly, according to Halsboe-Jørgensen.
Access “must be used with respect for the rules and the rules says that you must place a parking fine on the windscreen before you send any [fine], and it seems like that doesn’t always happen at the moment,” she said.
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The government has already attempted to address the issue with a directive stating a fine must be placed on the windscreen or handed directly to a driver.
The aim of this is to stop parking companies looking up car number plates in the vehicle registry and sending fines to the registered owner, who is thereby unable to use their right to question the basis for the fine on the spot.