New report 2024: The legal insecurity at the Swedish Migration Agency remains

Ill. Mattias Elftorp

The legal (in)security in Swedish asylum assessments is the name of the new report that has been handed over to the State Treasury and the Migration Agency's Director General Maria Mindhammar. The report is now translated to English. 

The government has commissioned the Swedish Agency for Public Management to review the asylum process at the Migration Agency, with the aim of ‘strengthening the quality, consistency, and legal security’. In particular, the handling of LGBTQI persons and converts should be looked into.

We who have been committed to the refugees since 2016 welcome this investigation. At the same time, we want to emphasize that there is legal uncertainty that affects all groups of refugees.

In 2021, we were the editors of the book The unnecessary refugee crisis – legal security, civil society and refugees 2015 – 2021, where around fifty co-authors shed light on various areas of the enforced crisis. In section 4, The Hollow Legal Security, the Migration Agency's investigations including age assessments and the handling of children, LGBTQI people and apostates are described, among other things.

We have now made a summary and update of the book's section 4, The Hollow Legal Security. The new report English version is called The legal (in)security in Swedish asylum assessments. From more than twenty aspects, we give an account of the legal uncertainty in the Migration Agency's asylum investigations that we ourselves have taken part in or that we have been informed about in other ways.

The topics covered include assessments of asylum seekers' stories, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the handling of traumatized persons and discrimination against Afghan citizens. The report contains many case descriptions and a number of references.

We have found that the Migration Agency not only violates Swedish law, but also its own guidelines and UNHCR's recommendations.

The author of the report is Ingrid Eckerman, founder of the network Stop the deportations to Afghanistan! and Karin Fridell Anter, chairman of Stöttepelaren (the Supporting pillar), a support association for unaccompanied children and young people.

The editors for The Unnecessary Refugee Crisis have supported the report: in addition to the authors, also Carin Flemström, Birgitta Göransson, Jan Stattin and Solveig Freudenthal. Among the demands that the editors place on the Swedish Migration Agency is structured training and supervision for all case managers. The editors also support the Swedish National Audit Office's demand for increased resources for the Migration Agency.

The report has also served as a basis for a complaint against the Migration Agency to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO).

We hope that the report will be useful not only to those who will do the new investigation, but also to journalists and students.

Download the report in English.

Download the report in Swedish. 

See also: New report: The Swedish Migration Agency underestimates the risks for returnees to Afghanistan  June 2023