January 25, 2019
As of New Year’s Day, Denmark has required anyone who takes Danish citizenship to shake hands at the naturalization ceremony, a requirement lawmakers said was aimed at Muslims who refuse on religious grounds to touch members of the opposite sex.
The law, passed December 20, has prompted strong reactions from some of the mayors who must conduct such ceremonies, and who are upset that they will become the faces of a policy many call awkward, “purely symbolic” and irrelevant to an applicant’s qualifications. They say the Danish Parliament, which approved the measure, has artificially elevated a social custom to a national value.
In recent months, the handshaking issue has become a new front in the war against radical Islam as perceived across Europe. Authorities in Switzerland and France have refused citizenship to foreigners who refuse to shake hands, citing “lack of assimilation” as the reason.
“If you arrive in Denmark, where it’s the custom to shake hands when you greet, if you don’t do it, it’s disrespectful,” said Martin Henriksen, a lawmaker who has been critical of Islam and is the right-wing Danish People’s Party’s spokesman on immigration. “If one can’t do something that simple and straightforward, there’s no reason to become a Danish citizen.”
He said he hoped it would be followed by a ban on Muslim women wearing veils at citizenship ceremonies.
The country’s integration minister, Inger Stojberg, wrote on her Facebook page that a handshake was a “visible sign that you’ve taken Denmark to heart.”
Some ultraorthodox Jewish groups prohibit or discourage their faithful from touching members of the opposite sex outside their immediate families. But they aren’t fleeing to Europe.
The handshake requirement is the latest in a series of Danish anti-immigrant measures. This summer, the Parliament prohibited the wearing of face veils in public, although researchers say only about 200 Muslim women follow the practice in Denmark. In 2015, the country sharply cut social programs for asylum seekers, and a law passed in 2016 allows the authorities to o “” confiscate migrants’ valuables to help cover the cost of their stays in Denmark.
