He arrived with nothing other than the clothes he wore that morning. Hours later he was banged up in a detention centre close to a Stockholm airport to await deportation. Charles, a former business director from Cambridge, who did not want his full name published, moved to Sweden in 2017 to be with his Swedish wife, Lily, and applied to remain after Brexit, before the deadline of December 2021.
But the migration agency rejected his application, and he and his wife have been fighting with the Swedish authorities ever since. In a message passed on by Lily, he said he was the only Briton in the detention centre, where he described being hemmed in by three lines of fences separated by a “no man’s land”. They then said they thought I would abscond, which is why they were going to detain me.” Lily, a lawyer, questioned whether Sweden, considered a global leader in human rights and progressive politics, was now like Afghanistan.
Charles could be deported in the next week unless his latest legal challenge delivers a reprieve. He joins a list of 2,490 Britons – of an estimated 14,000 in Sweden – deported from the country between 2020 and 2025, as questions are mounting as to why Sweden appears to have taken such a hardline approach to the Brexit withdrawal agreement (WA) over migration. In total, Sweden is responsible for 33% of all British nationals deported from the EU between 2021 and 2025, compared with France, which accounted for 6% of all British deportees, Spain at 3%, and Germany at 2%.
France deported 450, Spain 250 and Germany 160, while Italy deported just 15 Britons in that period. Different countries collate data in different ways, but Eurostat data suggests the Netherlands is another outlier, with 2,270 Britons deported in the same period. Data shows 2,100 removal orders were also issued in Sweden, though it is not clear how many of these resulted in voluntary departures or progressed to deportations.
People served with removal orders include Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old widow who has been in Sweden for 22 years, and George Mason, a 74-year-old with dementia who has been in Sweden for 25 years, both of whose applications missed the deadline to apply to remain in Sweden post-Brexit. John Sellers, a 34-year-old Briton who has lived in Sweden since he was 10, was deported in January. The cases also raise the question as to whether the WA delivers the political promise made by the Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and others promising citizens should not be collateral damage of Brexit.
Brexit should not alter the nature of people’s daily lives,” Barnier said in 2017. Nine years on, questions are being asked whether Sweden’s approach has been infected by its apparent lurch to the right more broadly, serving deportations on children and even a 95-year-old Iraqi woman who had lived in Sweden for 20 years. British citizens who lived in the country before Brexit have unique protection under the WA, but activists have noted that they appear to be subject to the same treatment as other foreign nationals.
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