Rokaia, Palestine

Refugees Welcome first applied for residency on humanitarian grounds for Rokaia in 2014 but was rejected. She was a stateless widow in her late 70s, and her entire family lived in Denmark and were all Danish citizens. Rokaia had lived with them since 2008.
 
RW asked a doctor to write a medical certificate on a pro bono basis, which documented that she was severely demented and needed help with every normal daily activity. She also had a number of chronic diagnoses on top of that.
 
Despite all of this, the authorities believed that she could manage on her own in Lebanon, where she had lived when her husband was alive. But the police did not dare put her on a plane.
 
When the extraordinary Paposhvili verdict was handed down by the European Court of Human Rights, RW applied for a reopening of her case, citing the verdict in April 2017. However, the Danish authorities ended up considering the verdict for a whole year, and then another year and 7 months went by before Rokaia's case was concluded.

After her case had been both in the newspaper Information and discussed at a meeting with the then-minister of immigration and integration Inger Støjberg, she was finally granted residence on humanitarian grounds, but not with reference to the Paposhivili ruling. She was 81 years old at the time, and had lived in Denmark without a residence permit for 12 years.