Begging ban in Ås
Begging ban in Ås
Wednesday 23rd of October, the Municipality Board in Ås passed a change in the police statutes, that included a ban on begging. What are the reasons for the ban, and is begging common in Ås? Is the change of statutes legal? Høyre, Frp, INP and Sp agrees on the change, but what is the opposition’s view on things?
Journalist: Henrik Bakken
Photographer: Håvard R. Magelssen
Translator: Eva Weston Szemes
The begging ban is a hot topic in Ås. Multiple representatives from the opposition have made strong comments about the ban passed by the Municipality Board. Municipality Board representative and group leader in Ås MDG, Magnus Dybdahl, is one of those who have reacted: “It’s wrong to ask people who don’t bother anyone to get away from the streets. Nobody begs because they want to, or to make people who are shopping or going for a walk uncomfortable. We think we will not solve any problems in Ås by refusing people who need some money the opportunity to ask for it”. Dybdahl also points out that very few people in Ås beg.
MDG proposed an alternative to the ban: “We understand that people don’t want to support organised crime where people are forced to beg, but nothing supports that this is the case in Ås. To deal with these concerns MDG proposed to ban forced begging, but this was stopped by the majority.”
“Poverty will not go away just because we make it a crime.” – Magnus Dybdahl
The situation in Norway
The ban on begging is very rare in Norway, only four other municipalities have such a ban: Aurland, Bjørnafjorden, Nissedal and Nordre Follo. Other municipalities have had a begging ban before, but most of them have allowed it again. Because this is decided on a municipality level, this might also be the case in Ås.
Historically
In Norway, we have had the so-called “Tramp law”, effective from 1907, concerning whether begging was allowed. The law was about tramps, homeless people, beggars and addicts. The law was of course modified a lot throughout the 1900s, and in 1995 the number of paragraphs was so reduced, the law was no longer used. The law was completely removed in 2006, and begging was made legal. The statutes that some municipalities want to change now and in the last few years in Norway is in other words no new way of doing politics.
Different opinions
Multiple different opinions have coloured the debate of the topic in the last few years. Brennpunkt’s documentary “Lykkelandet” from 2017 and Fafo’s report from 2015 played key roles in the debate. “Lykkelandet” documented an environment in Bergen where criminals took part of the money from Romanian beggars in Norway. Two years before “Lykkelandet” was published, Fafo had already concluded that the begging in Scandinavian countries were seldom organised by criminals, and Fafo scientist Guri Tyldum said that the documentary did not uincover criminals taking parts of the money earned on the street.
Kjetil Barfelt in Frp Ås has previously pointed out that begging done by foreign citizens on tourist visas in Norway is often linked to organised crime and human trafficking. He mentions, among other sources, the Kripos report "Trender og utfordringer i den organiserte kriminaliteten" from 2014, that documented several cases where there was a connection between begging and crime. Barfelt instead wants to use “common sense” and emphasises recurring statements from police instead of the Fafo report from 2015 that concluded that there was little evidence to support the claim that the money the beggars in Scandinavia received, was given to criminals: “The methods used in that survey were rather peculiar, to put it nicely”. “If you walk around and ask people if they are part of a criminal network, you should probably not be too surprised if their answer is no”.
This is criticism that the scientists behind the report have answered multiple times, and they have explained that they did not ask the beggars about possible criminals directly, but rather tried to discover hints of it through conversations with the beggars. Another method that was used was to examine the beggars’ stories in different ways and to also talk to multiple people aware of the situation. In other words, there are different ways to understand the situation, and an important question is whether the police or the scientists know these environments the best.
The European Convention on Human Rights
After the change in statutes, MDG, SV, Ap, Sentrum and Rødt have sent it to the County Governor to check if it’s legal, because they suspect that it is in breach of Article 8 in The European Convention on Human Rights, concerning the right to privacy and family life. Part of Article 8 reads: “There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
For the statute to be considered active, it has to be sent to the National Police Directorate, and if it is passed there, it will be considered current one month after this. The opposition has now sent the statute to the County Governor for control of whether it’s legal. On behalf of MDG, Magnus Dybdahl hopes that Ås municipality can instead spend energy and resources on doing something about the reasons people need to beg in Ås and Norway. He ends on the following note: “I hope we can show that Ås municipality is a warm and compassionate municipality where people in a tough spot in life can be allowed to ask for money if they need it”.
The debate about the begging ban in Ås clearly illustrates the lines between the majority’s focus on crime prevention, and the opposition’s focus on the most vulnerable people in our society. But the actual circumstances around how much of the begging is connected to organised crime is still unknown. The most important question to ask, however, is: What will a ban on begging actually solve?
