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We Must All be Equal Before the Law

Sweden is burning. Based on an article by Alice Teodorescu for GP.


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GOTHENBURG — As a compassionate human being, it's easy to feel sympathy for those who've been found to be lacking in justification for asylum and who dream of a better life in Sweden, writes Alice Teodorescu for GP. But the yearning, the dreams, and even pure desperation do not count for asylum with our current legislation.

Our parliament is in agreement, both on the left and on the right: immigration should be regulated. This means that only those who meet the criteria for our legislation have the right to remain here. This means, for the sake of clarity, that the opposite also holds: that those who do not meet these criteria enacted by parliament must leave the country.

In order to guarantee the correctness of the system, the case of the applicant can be reviewed from one to three times, in difference judicial instances. Our elected politicians formulate the judicial criteria which the Migration Agency in turn, and possibly thereafter our courts, can review without political interference. This is a system worth protecting, as it shields us from the arbitrary, and creates, over time, transparency.

We must all be equal before the law.

For more than a week, a few hundred people from the 'Young in Sweden' network have been demonstrating and gathering unaccompanied Afghanis, both in Stockholm and at other locations in our country. The demonstrators demand that, inter alia, rejection of the Afghani applications for asylum should be stopped.

As a compassionate human being, it's easy to feel sympathy for those who've been found to be lacking in justification for asylum and who dream of a better life in Sweden. But that yearning, the dreams, and even pure desperation do not count for asylum with our current legislation, and under no circumstances could a parliamentary party consider them as adequate criteria, what I know.



It is therefore highly confusing when representatives of the government, such as Gustav Fridolin of the Green Party and the new Minister for Migration, Social Democrat Heléne Fritzon, turn up at a demonstration whose purpose is to demand exceptions from the policies and by extension the legislation, which the current government brought to the floor of the parliament and supported.

If representatives of the government do not want to accept the consequences of their decisions, then they can go back to the parliament floor and work to change the law. But to do as now, to spend one's time in symbolic posturing at the demonstrations, although perhaps trendy at the moment, is nothing more than populist hypocrisy, which at the end of the day will damage faith in our justice and political systems.

Inasmuch as the special adviser for the Migration Agency has recently declared that, although the security situation in Afghanistan has indeed worsened, there are still many provinces where there is no armed conflict, not all Afghanis can be granted residence solely on the basis of nationality.

In practice, this means that Swedish agencies have to review each application individually. And when these reviews show us that the individual's reasons for asylum are lacking, the decision should be made and swiftly carried out.

Otherwise, our immigration is no longer regulated, but in direct conflict with the official position of our parliamentary parties.

See Also
Learning Curve: The Night of the Cynics
Red Hat Diaries: Like a Letter in the Post
Industry Watch: 'Conflicts in Afghanistan Don't Affect Everyone'

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