The UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), on Friday published a scathing report into what it argued was worsening racial discrimination in Sweden.
The committee expressed its "concerns" about reforms to citizenship, permanent residency and work permits set out in the Tidö Agreement that formed the government, which it warned could have "discriminatory effects on groups protected under the Convention", such as Muslims, people of African and Asian descent, asylum seekers and refugees.
The reforms it singled out for criticism included "heightened requirements for permanent residence permits and citizenship, including language and civics tests", and also "income thresholds" for work permits.
Sweden's Migration Minister Johan Forssell rejected the criticism of citizenship reforms, telling the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that "it has for much too long been much too easy to get Swedish citizenship".
“Becoming a Swedish citizen should mean something and it only does if you have to make an effort to achieve it," he said. "Stricter requirements create more incentives for successful integration. It is entirely reasonable for Sweden to introduce such requirements."
The reform that received the strongest criticism in the report was the introduction of so-called "security zones" or visitationszoner, where people can be frisked for drugs or weapons without a concrete suspicion.
"Sweden’s stop-and-search zones are repugnant and illegal. You can’t pick people up off the street just because of how they look. The stop-and-search zones violate the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to which Sweden is a party,” Gay McDougall, vice chair of the committee and one of the experts behind the report, told Svenska Dagbladet.
In the report, the committee warned that the decision to introduce the zones "increases the vulnerability of children from racialized groups who are most targeted by these random checks and racial profiling by law enforcement agencies."
Ebba Koril, press secretary to Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer, said that the government had carefully considered the risk of racial profiling before bringing in the security zones earlier this year.
"The government’s assessment then, as now, was that the regulation, through legal safeguards, is compatible with fundamental rights and freedoms and does not violate international conventions," she told SvD in a written statement.
The report also repeated a long-standing complaint that Sweden does not record any "comprehensive statistics on the demographic composition of the population, disaggregated by ethnicity".
This, it said, made it difficult to assess the situation of such groups, "including their socioeconomic status and any progress achieved by implementing targeted policies and programs".
Comments (6)