Petro, South Sudan
 
When we first met Petro, he had already been rejected for 10 years and was living in Sandholm. It would end up being 27 years of rejection before he finally received a residence permit in 2025. This makes him probably the person who has been in the asylum system the longest ever. He arrived in 1998 and was refused asylum.
 
We applied for humanitarian residence and tried several times to get the Refugee Appeals Board to reopen his asylum case. In our report on deportation hindrances ‘Asylum Camp Limbo’ from 2011, we described his hopeless case, where the core was doubt about his identity and nationality. The authorities did not believe that he was from South Sudan, as he maintained all these years. Language tests gave conflicting results, and no embassies or consulates would recognize him as a citizen of their country. It was assessed that Petro did not cooperate.
 
The Danish police had tried several times in vain to deport him, and along the way he was imprisoned in Ellebæk prison for 8 months and in Vestre Prison for 18 months. Only in 2008, after 10 years, did the police practically give up on deporting him. Since then, he has lived in various asylum centres without income and without the right to an internship, work or education. Refugees Welcome paid for his bus tickets during a period, and we made sure throughout the years that he received treatment for his severe periodontal disease, which is not available to rejected asylum seekers. 
 
Petro has stubbornly fought for access to Danish courses, even though he was not entitled to them, and over the years he has managed to pass the Danish Language 1, 2 and finally partly 3 exam, which is the level required to obtain citizenship. He has also taken mathematics and science at the 10th grade level. The Danish Parliament has since decided that it will be outright forbidden to study as a rejected asylum seeker in the future.
 
Many years ago, Petro entered into a relationship with a Danish man, with whom he was eventually formally allowed to live – but still had to report to the asylum centre in Avnstrup every 14 days. The Return Agency suddenly wanted to withdraw this arrangement and send him to a departure centre. Refugees Welcome, together with Petro’s partner, contacted the Danish Immigration Service and warned against this decision. Shortly afterwards, something close to a miracle happened: his partner had applied for family reunification with him for the third time, and had appealed the refusal – and this time the Immigration Appeals Board decided that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights gave him the right to legal residence due to his strong and long-standing connection to Denmark. 
 
After 27 years in the country and with fluent Danish, Petro has finally been granted a yellow health care card, and he no longer has to turn up for “deportation control” meetings.