Once again, Norwegian Immigration and Integration Minister Sylvi Listhaug, who is renowned for her hardline stance on asylum issues, is the driving force behind the proposal.
"This is a concern that PST also expressed before. We expect that people who have received training, participated in hostilities and committed war cries may bring their knowledge, ability and willingness to perform this type of operations here, to Norway."
According to Listhaug, participants in hostilities may have "crossed the line" by killing other people or been involved in other dramatic things, which must always be taken into account upon their return.
Unsurprisingly, this proposal has already spurred an outrage. What is remarkable is that the criticism has come from terror researchers circles, who must be in know.
"It would only provide [the police] with too much authority. The decisions would be based on classified information, which is unbecoming to a constitutional state. Once you utter the word 'terror,' all legal safeguards will be put aside. This is a sinister tendency," Lars Gule, a social commentator and associate professor at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences and former Secretary General of the Norwegian Humanist Association, told NRK.
However, there is always a chance that the law might be used somewhat indiscriminately. Previously, even Danish citizens fighting against Daesh alongside Kurdish Peshmerga forces had their passports confiscated in the crackdown on "foreign fighters." The most notorious examples of penalizing people who fought on the same side as Denmark did are Martin (surname undisclosed), a 32-year old native of Esbjerg, who in 2015 joined the anti-Daesh fight in Iraq, and Joanna Palani, a 23-year-old Danish-Kurdish woman who was imprisoned, stripped of her visa and banned from international travel for 12 months for breaking the "foreign fighter rule."
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