DENMARK:FROM THEIR apartment in the Swedish university town of Lund, Chileshe Rahim, a 22-year-old Dane, and her Algerian husband, Karim, have been keeping a close eye on the fallout from Ireland's latest legal tussle over immigration policy.
In a landmark ruling last month, the European Court of Justice decided against the Irish Government and affirmed that non-EU nationals married to EU citizens are entitled to live in their spouse's country. But while the ruling slipped quietly from public debate here, it is still dominating the news in Denmark.
For Rahim and thousands of other Danes who were forced by their country's strict immigration laws to move abroad because they married a non-EU citizen, it offered the possibility of an end to their exile. For Denmark's minority centre-right government under prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, it threatened to fatally undermine a tough stance on immigration that has helped keep it in power since 2001.
The row centres on the question of marrying rights for non-EU citizens. Under Danish law, both partners must be over the age of 24 and have a greater "affiliation" to Denmark than any other country, while couples must also prove they are financially self-sustaining. As a result, up to 2,000 Danes with spouses from outside the EU have been driven into involuntary exile in Sweden, many using the 16km (10-mile) Öresund bridge that connects the two countries across the Baltic Sea.
One of the reasons for the law's introduction in 2002 was to deter arranged marriages among young Danish citizens with an immigrant background, and the populist Danish People's Party - whose parliamentary support is vital to the survival of Mr Rasmussen's coalition - is angry that the European court could undo it.
"This is a big threat to the political wish for stronger regulation of immigration," said Morten Messerschmidt, one of its MPs.
For the government the timing could not be worse. Just before the European court ruling, a series of newspaper revelations suggested that the Danish immigration service had systematically failed to inform potential immigrants of their rights under EU rules on freedom of movement. These allow a Danish citizen to bring a non-EU spouse to live in Denmark, provided that the Danish citizen has lived and worked in another EU country for at least two weeks. The revelations are damaging, and some believe their implications could run deeper even than the European court ruling.
For Rahim, however, it may have come too late. She and her husband have been living in Sweden now for two years and she recently gave birth to their second child. It's not easy: jobs are fewer on this side of the Baltic and the couple still struggle with their halting Swedish. But Karim recently got long-term residency in Sweden. If they were to return to Denmark, it would take him seven years to qualify for the same permit.
That made it all the more difficult to hear that their exile may have been unnecessary all along. "It was devastating," she says. "It was like a blow to the stomach."