On January 15th, the cross-party Committee on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms proposed changing Sweden's constitution so that dual citizens who commit “crimes which threaten Sweden's security” can lose their citizenship.
The serious crimes, the committee’s report read, would include crimes such as espionage, high treason, incitement to war, and rebellion.
It stopped short of making it possible to revoke citizenship from gang criminals, although the three government parties and the far-right Sweden Democrats added a reservation to the conclusions explaining that they had wanted to go further and extend the possibility of revocation to other serious crimes such as gang crime.
“To put it simply, a gang boss somewhere abroad who is orchestrating murders, shootings and explosions on our streets – it wouldn’t be possible to revoke citizenship from such a person considering the limitations in this proposal,” Strömmer told a press conference earlier in January.
Now, TV4 reports, the government will go ahead with its original plan to include gang criminals in the new law, despite parliament being undecided on the issue.
The Social Democrats and the other opposition parties – the Green Party, Centre Party and Left Party – were all against this specific aspect of the law, stating that it was not clear enough.
“It’s correct that we are now putting together a plan to move forward as soon as possible,” Strömmer confirmed in a written comment to the TT newswire.
“In order to win some time, we’re going to look into this issue both as a constitutional change and as part of a normal law,” he said.
A law making it possible to revoke citizenship would require a change to the constitution, which means two votes in parliament on either side of a general election.
“Now we’re putting forward a concrete proposal that the parties can decide on. In order to take back control from the gangs, we need to move our position forward on multiple fronts at the same time, doing something that Sweden hasn’t done before,” Strömmer told TT.
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