Alice Al Maleh is a student of International Development Studies and Cultural Encounters, based in Copenhagen. She has previously worked with awareness-raising and education on forced displacement and refugee rights and has been following the development of Danish asylum policies closely since 2015.
Since Aya Abu-Daher was granted asylum in Denmark in 2015, she did everything that was of her and more: she learned the language, made plenty of Danish friends and was only three months away from her high school graduation, aiming for university.
When news broke that the 19-year-old student had been denied an extension of her residence permit, there was a public outcry. Her classmates wrote an open letter to the Minister of Immigration and the principal of her school appeared alongside her on national television to defend her right to remain in Denmark.