The Local’s James Savage asked Forssell at a press conference on Wednesday why the government had opted not to implement the law with transitional rules.
“Because we want these changes to take place as soon as possible for security reasons, but also to handle the integration challenges that we’re seeing,” Forssell said.
“Having no transitional rules is also in line with most legislation that has been put into place. The odd thing would rather be to do it the opposite way,” he added.
According to a comparison by campaign group Fair Transition, which is calling for transitional rules on the new citizenship laws due to come into force in June this year, Sweden is the only country in Europe to bring in new citizenship rules without transitional rules or a transitional period for people who applied before the new laws come into force.
Under the new proposal, anyone with a pending citizenship application on June 6th this year will have their application processed under the new rules, even if it was submitted before that date.
The new rules include a longer residency requirement ‒ eight years instead of five, as a general rule ‒ a self-sufficiency requirement and a requirement to show knowledge of Swedish language and civics, despite the fact that the civics test will not be ready until August this year and the language test will not be ready until October 2027.
With the average waiting time for citizenship hitting 47 months last month, this means that thousands of applications, many of which were submitted years ago, stand to be rejected when the new rules come into force, despite them meeting all the requirements at the time of application.
“Of course we’re looking into the views of what the Council on Legislation has said, but we have also listened to other information around this and made our decision," Forssell said.
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When pressed as to what exactly the security reasons behind a lack of transitional rules were, Forssell said that the Swedish police needed more time to detect people who may pose a threat to Sweden.
“Swedish police have repeatedly said that five years is a very short period of time in order to detect security threats to Swedish society, and of course, increasing that time frame is essential.”
“If you had transitional rules, that would also mean or imply that many people who have applied for citizenship – tens of thousands – would not be assessed in the new time frame. Of course, this is a complicated topic, needless to say, and there are different perspectives. But Swedish national security is extremely important to us. We are talking about Swedish citizenship here, not some ordinary thing. This is one of the most essential things in our society. That’s why we have made this decision.”
Interview by James Savage, article by Becky Waterton.
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