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IMMIGRATION

Danish school under fire for ‘ethnic quota’ classes

A Danish school was criticised on Wednesday for limiting the number of students from ethnic minorities in some of its classes, in a bid to prevent students from a Danish background from leaving it.

Published: 7 September 2016 17:40 CEST
Danish school under fire for 'ethnic quota' classes
The school has gone from 25 percent ethnic minority students in 2007 to 80 percent today. Photo: Flemming Krogh/Scanpix
The Langkær upper secondary school outside the city of Aarhus said its first-year students had been divided into seven different classes, out of which three classes had a 50 percent limit on the number of  ethnic minority students.
 
The remaining four classes consisted only of students from an immigrant background.
 
The school’s headmaster, Yago Bundgaard, denied allegations that the practice amounted to discrimination and said that the aim was to encourage integration by preventing a dwindling number of  ethnic Danes from leaving the school.
 
“For real integration to take place in a class there has to be sufficient numbers from both groups for it to happen,” he told public broadcaster DR.
 
The school had seen the number of ethnic minority students rise from 25 percent in 2007 to 80 percent of this year’s first-year students.
 
Describing it as “the least bad solution”, Bundgaard said that the ethnic minority students had been picked based on whether they had “a Danish-sounding name”, but admitted that it was a “fluid” distinction.
 
Turkish-born commentator and former lawmaker Özlem Cekic said she would report the school to Denmark’s Board of Equal Treatment (Ligebehandlingsnævnet).
 
“When a headmaster isolates the brown children from the white in an upper secondary school, he is part of sending a signal that the whites must be protected from the brown,” she wrote on Facebook.
 
Human rights lawyer Nanna Krusaa also told broadcaster TV 2 that “placing students solely based on race or ethnicity is in my clear view illegal”.
 
Danish Education Minister Ellen Trane Nørby said that she had requested a report from the school to ensure that the law was being upheld, but that she was also looking at introducing legislation to make upper secondary schools in Denmark more ethnically mixed.
 
“The fundamental problem is that we in Denmark have… schools with a too high ratio of students with a different ethnic background than Danish,” she wrote on Facebook.

DISCRIMINATION

‘Sweden should apologise to Tornedalian minority’: Truth commission releases report

The Swedish state should issue a public apology to the country's Tornedalian minority, urges a truth commission set up to investigate historic wrongdoings.

Published: 15 November 2023 14:14 CET
'Sweden should apologise to Tornedalian minority': Truth commission releases report

Stockholm’s policy of assimilation in the 19th and 20th centuries “harmed the minority and continues to hinder the defence of its language, culture and traditional livelihoods,” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset said in an article published in Sweden’s main daily Dagens Nyheter.

“Amends must be made in order to move forward,” it said, adding that “acknowledging the historic wrongdoings” should be a first step.

The commission, which began work in June 2020, was to submit a final report to the government on Wednesday.

Tornedalen is a geographical area in northeastern Sweden and northwestern Finland. The Tornedalian, Kven and Lantalaiset minority groups are often grouped under the name Tornedalians, who number around 50,000 in Sweden.

The commission noted that from the late 1800s, Tornedalian children were prohibited from using their mother tongue, meänkieli, in school and forced to use Swedish, a ban that remained in place until the 1960s.

From the early 1900s, some 5,500 Tornedalian children were sent away to Lutheran Church boarding schools “in a nationalistic spirit”, where their language and traditional dress were prohibited.

Punishments, violence and fagging were frequent at the schools, and the Tornedalian children were stigmatised in the villages, the commission said.

“Their language and culture was made out to be something shameful … (and) their self-esteem and desire to pass on the language to the next generation was negatively affected.”

The minority has historically made a living from farming, hunting, fishing and reindeer herding, though their reindeer herding rights have been limited over the years due to complexities with the indigenous Sami people’s herding rights.

“The minority feels that they have been made invisible, that their rights over their traditional livelihoods have been taken away and they now have no power of influence,” the commission wrote.

It recommended that the meänkieli language be promoted in schools and public service broadcasting, and the state “should immediately begin the process of a public apology”.

The Scandinavian country also has a separate Truth Commission probing discriminatory policies toward the Sami people.

That report is due to be published in 2025.

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