Swedish Migration Minister Johan Forssell last week told The Local that the decision to implement new citizenship rules with no transitional period, against the advice of the Council on Legislation and an official inquiry, was due to “security reasons”.
“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," he said, saying that bringing in transitional rules would mean that "tens of thousands" of people would obtain citizenship without being properly assessed.
READ ALSO: 'Security reasons' behind lack of transitional rules for Swedish citizenship
The Local contacted Säpo, Sweden's security police, to ask what concrete security threat those in the queue for citizenship represented.
Gabriel Wernstedt, a press officer for the agency, said that both violent extremism and the activities of hostile foreign powers were time-consuming to investigate.
"Both of these have a high ability to conceal their security-threatening activities, which takes time to get a picture of," he said, explaining the advantages of imposing a longer wait.
When judging whether a person constitutes a threat, he added, the agency needed to make "qualified analyses of many different intelligence reports", which again takes time.
Finally, foreign citizens already long established in Sweden can "develop into security threats", presumably through radicalisation by extremist groups or recruitment by a foreign power.
"For that reason, it often takes a long time to get a better picture of the person," he said.
The Local also asked why the agency did not instead increase the number of Säpo staff working on citizenship cases, and why it was not able to simply rely on its existing power to vet citizenship applicants and warn the Migration Agency of applicants who might pose a security threat.
Wernstedt declined to answer any of these questions directly, instead pointing us to a page on the Security Agency's website explaining how the agency functions as an advisory referral authority to the Migration Agency on citizenship cases.
When the government put the proposals of the government inquiry into stricter citizenship rules out for consultation, the Security Police (Säpo) recommended not having transitional rules.
They wrote in their response that for security reasons there is a “strong interest in all cases in which a decision has not yet been made as a starting point to be covered by the new provisions on a longer period of residence to acquire Swedish citizenship".
Comments (10)