Partly closed residential institutions should ensure better knowledge of the special rules and legal safeguards that apply when using force

Publiceret 25-09-2025

Denmark’s seven partly closed residential institutions for children and young people should do more to ensure that the institutions have sufficient knowledge of the special rules and legal safeguards that apply when force is used in these institutions.

This appears from the Ombudsman’s new thematic report on institutions for children after carrying out monitoring visits to Denmark’s seven partly closed residential institutions and partly closed wards in residential institutions.

For instance, the institutions have a special right to detain the children and young people by locking outer doors and windows for periods of time. There is also more extended access to physically restraining a child or a young person.

‘Physical restraint and detainment are severe interventions in relation to children and young people. It is therefore important that the institutions ensure that they have sufficient knowledge of the special rules and procedural guarantees that apply to such interventions’, says Parliamentary Ombudsman Christian Britten Lundblad.

Must inform of rights 

In the report, the Ombudsman also points out that the institutions must generally become better at informing the young people and their parents about their rights in relation to the use of force and other interventions in the right to self-determination and about their right to complain.

It is the Ombudsman’s impression that staff at the visited institutions were generally committed and reflective in the cooperation with the children and the young people. And that the institutions were focused on reducing the use of force, for instance by means of de-escalating behaviour and dialogue with the young people.

The Ombudsman chose to focus on the partly closed residential institutions and wards precisely because of the special rules applying to the use of force in these institutions and wards and because recent years have seen several instances of critical mention of conditions in partly closed institutions.

The Ombudsman will discuss his recommendations and a number of other observations from the monitoring visits with, respectively, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Housing and the Ministry of Children and Education.

Read the Ombudsman’s thematic report in its entirety.

 

Further details:

Director of International Relations Klaus Kinnerup Hede, kkh@ombudsmanden.dk

Facts

Generally on the Ombudsman’s monitoring visits

  • The Parliamentary Ombudsman carries out regular monitoring visits in public and private institutions, where people are or can be deprived of their liberty.
  • The monitoring visits are carried out in cooperation with the Danish Institute for Human Rights and DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, which contribute with human rights and medical expertise.
  • The Ombudsman’s Children’s Division carries out monitoring visits to institutions for children.
  • Every year, a theme is chosen for the year’s monitoring visits to both institutions for children and institutions for adults.
  • Every year, a report is made in which the Ombudsman summarises and communicates the most important results of the year’s thematic visits.
  • The Ombudsman regularly makes public which institutions etc. he has visited, and he also makes public the concluding letters to the institutions, in Danish.