What has the committee proposed?
The Committee on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (2023 års fri- och rättighetskommitté) proposed that the current absolute right Swedish citizens have to retain their citizenship should be limited to allow the citizenship of dual citizens to be revoked in three situations:
- If they are found guilty of crimes which pose a serious threat to Sweden's security, such as espionage, terrorism, sabotage, treason, or rebellion
- If they are found guilty of crimes covered by the International Criminal Court, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression
- If they received their citizenship on false grounds, either through supplying false documents or information or by bribing or threatening government officials
What does the constitution say about revoking Swedish citizenship?
The right to retain Swedish citizenship is currently absolute.
"No Swedish citizen who is domiciled in Sweden or who has previously been domiciled in Sweden may be deprived of his or her citizenship," reads the text in the Instrument of Government, or Regeringsformen, one of Sweden's four constitutional laws.
This means that once citizenship has been granted it can only be taken away in the case of children under the age of 18 who want to switch to the same citizenship as a foreign parent.
Even someone who is shown to have bribed or threatened an official to gain their citizenship on completely false grounds still cannot have it revoked once it has been awarded.
When will the new limits to the right to retain Swedish citizenship come into force?
Changing one of Sweden's constitutional laws requires the bill to be passed by the Swedish parliament twice, once either side of a general election.
As the 2026 election will be held in September and a new government is unlikely to be in place until October or November, in practice this means that the change to the constitution would not come into force until 2027 at the earliest.
The government expects it to take up to a year from now to put the committee's conclusions out to consultation, draw up legislation and send the bill to the parliament, meaning the first vote is unlikely to take place until well into 2026.
Does the possibility of losing citizenship obtained fraudulently mean dual citizens could lose their Swedish citizenships for mistakes in an application?
Not unless those mistakes are so serious that you would not have been granted citizenship if you had not made them.
In every other area of administrative law in Sweden, the principle is that if an individual has received a positive decision from the government on the basis of false information, that decision can be overturned if an administrative court rules that with the correct information a positive decision would not have been given.
Swedish citizenship is the only exception to this and the committee argues that this exception should end.
"What distinguishes citizenship decisions from other favourable administrative decisions is that in practice they can never be reconsidered, no matter how great the shortcomings," the committee wrote in its report.
This means, it continued, that the state cannot revoke the citizenship even of someone who has provided an "incorrect identity in order to conceal a terrorist connection".
In practice, changing the law on this will mean that if the false information provided were sufficiently significant that without it citizenship would not have been granted, a court will be able to reverse the decision.
Some of the parties wanted to make it possible to also strip citizenship from those who commit other serious crimes. Might they get their way?
The representatives on the committee from the Moderate, Sweden Democrat, Christian Democrats and the Liberal parties added an additional statement to the report regretting that there had not been a majority in the committee in favour of allowing citizenship to be taken from people found guilty of "serious system-threatening crimes committed within the framework of a criminal network".
This could have been done, they argued, by adding a clause to the constitution allowing the revocation of citizenship for "crimes which seriously threaten the state's vital interests".
The Sweden Democrats' immigration spokesperson, Ludvig Aspling, said that even if the proposal didn't have a majority in the committee, the parties that support it do have a majority in the parliament.
"Technically, it has the support it needs, but because we're talking about constitutional reform, we're always seeking a broad majority, so we'll see," he told The Local. "But I really, really hope that the Social Democratic Party will come to their senses during the process and support the proposition from our side."
At the press conference, Sweden's Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer said that enacting the government parties' desired change would allow citizenship to be stripped from the leaders of the gangs behind the shootings and bomb attacks that have plagued Sweden over the past decade.
"To be very concrete: the top level of criminal networks sitting abroad directing murders, shootings and bombings in Sweden. I think that would be a natural step, but now we have the proposals, we have what has been possible to reach a majority around in the committee, so let's see what the process will lead us," he said in response to a question from The Local's Paul O'Mahony.
He had not given up on getting this broader exception into a future constitutional bill and then winning the support of opposition parties, he added.
"I think that it is a very sound starting point in constitutional issues to do as much as you can to find as broad an agreement as possible. I hope that several parties can change their position on that point and I don't think that would be a very big step and I'm convinced that it can be done in a very precise way."
Why were the opposition parties opposed to extending the exception to serious crimes?
Anders Ygeman, migration spokesperson for the Social Democrats, told The Local that his party had refused to support the government parties' approach because it was framed so loosely that it "could be used for situations which were impossible to predict beforehand".
"If the government wants to widen the scope, they need to be much more precise and you have to be able to predict the consequences," he said.
At the press conference, Strömmer defended the use of the formulation "crimes which seriously threaten the state's vital interests", saying it had been taken from the European Convention on Citizenship, and was the phrase used in the Danish constitution.
"This is not something which has been plucked out of thin air, quite the contrary," he said. "There's a reason to use a concept which already exists in the context of international law with regard to citizenship and is in addition used by our Nordic neighbours."
Is there a risk that this could open the way for citizenship to be revoked for lesser crimes, or even for political opposition?
At the press conference, Jan Riise, the MP for the Green Party on the committee, said he did not support the committee's conclusions because he was opposed to revoking citizenship as a punishment, and concerned that the list of crimes deserving of this risked expanding.
"We don't want to make it a tool for for criminal punishment," he told The Local. "I'm a little bit worried about creating a situation where all kinds of crimes can be subject to a discussion about whether this person should have citizenship or not."
If the change is limited to the exception proposed by the committee, "crimes which pose a serious threat to Sweden's security", his fears seem unfounded, as adding new crimes would require another law to be passed changing the constitution once again.
If the government parties get their way, and dual citizens who commit "crimes which seriously threaten the state's vital interests" can also lose their citizenship, the list of eligible crimes might be broader.
Aspling, however, rejected the opposition parties' claim that the "vital interests" formulation was too vague.
"We're using the same verbiage as our neighboring countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, and we're also using the same verbiage that's being used in the International Convention on Citizenship. And the point of using the same words is, obviously, to connect the Swedish legislation to the international law. So no, I'm not worried."
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