Denmark named it, and Europe’s court drew the line
This is the clearest test case in the archive of a rule we set ourselves: when a document supports the argument and another document limits it, both go in. Denmark produced both within seven years of each other.
What the law says
In 2018 the Danish parliament adopted a package amending the public-housing acts. It did something European legislatures usually avoid: it wrote a numerical definition into statute.
“Ved et ghettoområde forstås et boligområde, hvor andelen af
indvandrere og efterkommere fra ikkevestlige lande overstiger 50 pct., og hvor mindst to
af kriterierne i stk. 1 er opfyldt.”
L 38 (2018/1), definition clause — “A ghetto area means a housing area where the share of immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries exceeds 50 per cent, and where at least two of the criteria in subsection 1 are met.”
Denmark’s own legislative vocabulary for the wider policy is “parallel societies” (parallelsamfund). It is not an activist coinage; it is the term a European parliament legislated with.
What the court said
On 18 December 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on that criterion.
Under Article 2(2)(a) of Directive 2000/43/EC, the Danish criterion targeting areas where “immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants” exceed 50% can constitute direct discrimination based on ethnic origin.
Judgment C-417/23, Slagelse Almennyttige Boligselskab — operative part, via EUR-Lex
Why we publish both
It would be easy to cite only the statute. It shows a Northern European social democracy naming a problem in law, which is a fact people are often told does not exist. It would be equally easy to cite only the judgment, and treat the whole policy as settled prejudice.
Neither is the record. The record is that a European legislature legislated, and a European court found that the way it drew its line runs into the anti-discrimination directive — because the line was drawn on origin, not on conduct, ideology, or organisation.
That distinction is the whole architecture of this archive. Our subject is an ideology and its organisations, never a population. The Danish criterion is a live example of what happens when a state substitutes a demographic proxy for the thing it actually means to address: the measure becomes legally vulnerable, and the argument underneath it becomes easier to dismiss along with it.
So the register carries both rows, and the harms entry for the statute is annotated to say so: it is never to be cited alone.
The general rule
A source that only ever confirms you is not a source, it is a mirror. If this archive is to be worth citing in a committee room or a newsroom, the person checking it has to find the counter-document already there — put there by us, before they went looking.