Ungdomshuset
That building was originally named Folkets Hus ("House of the People"), constructed by Copenhagen's labour movement in 1897.
[2][3] After the eviction, users and supporters held weekly demonstrations on Thursday evenings, demanding a new location for the Ungdomshuset.
The event, which gathered several thousand, was announced as non-violent, but was met with heavy opposition from the police who arrested 436 people and threw large amounts of tear gas.
[6] The new Ungdomshuset opened successfully on 1 July 2008, it is located at Dortheavej 61 in northwest Copenhagen's Bispebjerg area,[7] after more than 16 months of weekly demonstrations.
However, as this was prohibited due to the historic importance of the place, Brugsen sold the ground to the folk music ensemble Tingluti in 1978.
As a consequence of a burst water main which they could not afford to repair, Tingluti had to sell the ground to the municipality of Copenhagen.
In 1982, Folkets Hus was assigned to a group of young people—the original founders of Ungdomshuset—although the municipality of Copenhagen still owned the building.
The municipality of Copenhagen decided to close the house, claiming that it would be too expensive to repair the damages and renovate the building.
The activists of the house decided to fix the damages themselves and on 1 March of the next year, their work was approved by the fire prevention department.
[11] This prodded the users of the building to post a large banner on the facade with the message: "For sale along with 500 autonome, stone throwing, violent psychopaths from hell.".
Until 1 March 2007 the young squatters used the house as if the change of ownership had not happened and the new owners were not allowed inside at any time.
On 7 January 2004 the verdict from City Court arrived, stating that Faderhuset was entitled to sue four activists (rather than Ungdomshuset itself).
The building was taken with assistance from a military helicopter, an airport crash tender and two boom cranes, used as a form of modern-day siege towers.
Special forces entered the building from the roof, the windows and the ground, while the house was covered in foam to diminish the effectiveness of possible counterattacks such as Molotov cocktails.
[31] In total, the police carried out raids searching for activists for six days and six nights, for example at the People's House of Stengade, at an independent collective in Baldersgade, at the Solidaritetshuset and in many personal flats in Copenhagen.
[10] The operation had an international scale, and has even been qualified by Le Monde diplomatique as "a 'laboratory experience' in police repression."
[9] Witnesses have claimed that plainclothes police agents, wearing earphones, circulated in the scene of the riots, speaking foreign languages (German, French and English).
[9] Asked by a Danish newspaper, the Copenhagen's police's spokesman denied the presence of active units from others countries.
[9] Other analysts noticed that the same tactics used by the French police during the 2006 students' protests against the First Employment Contract (CPE) had been used: special units of undercover agents moving around the demonstrators, and suddenly grabbing those who seemed to be the leaders.
At 10 am the Danish Working Environment Authority (Arbejdstilsynet) had the demolition interrupted due to reported concerns about dust and the potential presence of asbestos.
[32] Germany has seen more than twenty actions[33] and there have also been solidarity protests in Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Poland.
[9] Based on a population of approximately a million in Copenhagen, the Monde diplomatique noticed that if the same proportion of arrests had been carried out in Paris, 8,000 persons would have been detained.
A penitentiary building of Copenhagen had to be partially emptied of its common law detainees to make place for the arrested youth.
On 16 March 2007, Danish police admitted to having mistakenly used a potentially lethal form of delivery system for tear gas.
[40] On Monday 22 December 2008, five women and ten men who were present in the house at the time of eviction, received sentences of imprisonment.
[41] In a Channel 4 interview, broadcast on 14 November 2011, British undercover police officer Mark Kennedy claimed that his inside intelligence was instrumental in the eviction of the original Ungdomshuset.
