What happened
Sweden has expelled more Britons than any other EU country following the UK's withdrawal from the union. In an interview with the news site The Local, the Swedish Migration Agency's director of legal affairs, Susanne Fonsell, stated that she is not a specialist in Brexit rules and responded to questions about proportionality by saying that the legal system must be based on rules and not on emotions. Following the interview, the editorial management of The Local demands that the Swedish Migration Agency in its current form be phased out. The proposal is that the agency should solely handle asylum cases and that a new authority should take care of work permits and citizenship.
Our analysis
The Swedish Migration Agency's director of legal affairs, Susanne Fonsell, demonstrates how the agency's culture of control impacts people who have followed the rules and established their lives here. The fact that Sweden has expelled more Britons than any other EU country shows that the problem lies within the agency's own application and not in EU law. When Fonsell dismisses legal proportionality as a matter of emotions, she overlooks a fundamental legal principle intended to protect new Swedes from disproportionate interference. The mainstream debate also overlooks the role of the courts, where the migration courts have not referred a single Brexit case to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling. The next step lies with the Government and the Riksdag, which must determine whether the agency should continue to be guided by distrust or be reformed into a functioning service-oriented operation.
Explained
The principle of proportionality is a legal rule requiring that decisions by public authorities must not be more far-reaching or harmful to the individual than the objective necessitates.