When Denmark’s 2022 parliamentary election was over, 26 complaints were filed about the vote, for instance over the design of the ballots.
But when the newly elected members of Parliament took up the complaints a couple of weeks after Election Day, they concluded that all elected candidates could be approved.
»None of the complaints gave rise to changes in the election results«, they said.
The presumably pleased members of Parliament could thus keep the seats in Folketinget they had just won.
But when election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) later scrutinized the Danish election, the organization pointed to the fundamental conflict of interest in letting members of Parliament themselves decide whether any complaints should lead to parliamentary seats possibly having gone to someone else.
Something that, according to the OSCE’s report on the 2022 election, »runs counter to good international practice«.
»In line with good international practice, election complaints should be subject to judicial review«, the report concluded.
The criticism, however, has not led to any changes, and when the parliamentary election on Tuesday evening – nearly four years later – is over, it will again be the 179 elected members of Parliament who must decide whether complaints should mean that other candidates might have been entitled to the seats.
»I usually say that if these were the rules in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, we would probably find them deeply troubling«, said Jørgen Albæk Jensen, a professor emeritus of law and one of Denmark’s leading experts in constitutional law.
»There’s something fundamentally problematic about a newly elected member of Parliament deciding his own fate and, by extension, the fate of political opponents«, Albæk Jensen said.
The OSCE report came out in April 2023, but in fact government lawyers have been aware of the problem for about six years.
As early as July 2020, the European Court of Human Rights issued a judgment against Belgium.
The court held that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights for Belgium’s newly elected Parliament to rule on a complaint about the election process filed by a candidate who had not been elected.
The elected candidates were not impartial in deciding such complaints, the judgment said, citing the convention’s provisions on access to effective remedies and the right to free elections.
Even then, the ruling reverberated in Denmark, because if the Belgian system violated human rights, the same would also be true of the Danish system, as Jørgen Albæk Jensen said in Politiken in 2020.
At the time, the Justice Ministry responded that it would examine what the judgment meant for Denmark.
In fact the Justice Ministry’s lawyers had already tried, before the 2020 ruling, to persuade the human-rights court not to condemn Belgium, because such a judgment could also hit Denmark. To no avail. Belgium was found in violation.
Politically fraught
When Politiken, on the fifth anniversary of the judgment against Belgium – in July 2025 – again asked the government whether it had finished its review, the answer was the same:
»The Justice Ministry can state that work on a closer assessment of the judgment’s significance is still ongoing in cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and Health«.
By that point, another judgment had in fact been handed down by the human-rights court. This time it was against Iceland, and again the court said that a complaint-handling system like Iceland’s – which according to Jørgen Albæk Jensen is copied from Denmark’s – violated the convention.
But Denmark’s ministries are still weighing whether it should have consequences for the Danish system, the Ministry of the Interior and Health said.
According to Jørgen Albæk Jensen, the case is difficult because the Danish model follows the Constitution, which ranks above the European Convention on Human Rights in the hierarchy of laws:
»That’s probably also why they don’t do anything about it as long as they’re not absolutely forced to. The answer you’ll get if you ask again will likely be that they’re still considering different models, but I don’t know whether any real work is actually being done on it. I have my doubts. I think it’s such a politically fraught issue that they’d rather leave it be, because if you really wanted to address it effectively, it would require amending the Constitution«.
Jørgen Albæk Jensen does not rule out, however, that within the Constitution’s framework an independent election commission could be established to handle complaints at the first stage, after which Parliament could formally approve the commission’s recommendation. Such a model might be acceptable to the human-rights court, he said.
Do you think you and I will be having this conversation again after the next parliamentary election?
»Yes, I think so. The only thing that could really get the case moving would be if there were a complaint about a parliamentary election that went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights and Denmark was found in violation«, Jørgen Albæk Jensen replied.
Neither Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard (Socialdemokratiet, S) nor Interior and Health Minister Sophie Løhde (Venstre, V) has wished to comment on the matter.
