"The parties are also agreed that the organisations around schools, healthcare, social services and public libraries should be exempted from the proposed duty to share information," Sweden's migration minister, Johan Forssell, said at a press conference held for the conclusions of a government inquiry into strengthening Sweden's ability to deport rejected asylum seekers.
The agreement has been seen as a defeat for the far-right Sweden Democrats, which have over the past year repeatedly resisted calls from the Liberal party that teachers, healthcare social workers, and library staff be exempted, and from the Christian Democrats that healthcare workers be exempted.
"This is a victory for the Liberal Party and for Sweden," Liberal Party leader Johan Pehrson said in a post on X. School should be a safe place both for children and for teachers, and the same should go for those who seek help from healthcare, social services or a library. The Liberal Party's demand will now be that the exemption for these services from the duty to report is realised."
The Sweden Democrats' migration spokesperson Luvid Aspling conceded that the party would have preferred not to have had exemptions.
"For us as a party this is of course not the result we would have liked to have seen," he told the public broadcaster SR, but he said the increased abilities proposed to allow the authorities to search asylum seekers' phones and computers were also important steps forward.
In her report, the former judge who chaired the inquiry, Anita Linder, concluded that forcing doctors, nurses and teachers to report paperless migrants risked consequences too severe to justify the benefits to migration returns.
"There is a risk that people will not dare to seek healthcare treatment or else get treatment much too late if they know that information might be passed on. There's also a risk, when you talk about infectious diseases, that this will lead to a greater spread of infection," she said.
When it came to schools, she said that imposing a duty to report might conflict with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
"There is a risk that children will not want to or be allowed to take advantage of school, and this means there is a risk that we would not live up to our commitments under the child convention," she said.
She also argued that lifting the barriers to information exchange for the Swedish Tax Agency, Public Employment Service, Enforcement Authority, Social Insurance Agency, Pensions Agency and Prison and Probation Authority, would have a significant effect on helping the Swedish Border Police and the Swedish Migration Agency find and deport rejected asylum seekers.
"Our judgement is that it is primarily the Tax Agency which is the most significant in relation to this, and to a certain extent also the Social Insurance Agency and the Pensions Agency," she said. "For the others, it's probably going to be pretty seldom that they have relevant information."
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