Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration Vol. 7 No. 2 Sweden’s Temporary Asylum Law and the Indefinite Statelessness of Refugees By Jason Tucker This paper explores the law and policy related to the identification, assessment, and recording of the statelessness of refugees in the Swedish asylum procedure. It considers the gaps in law and policy that can lead to a stateless refugee remaining in a prolonged, or potentially, indefinite stateless situation and the impacts of the temporary asylum law introduced in 2016. The temporary law can be seen to undermine useful legislation that saw many stateless refugees receiving citizenship after four years. However, the new State discourse introduced full-time employment or completion of education as a requirement to acquire permanent residence, a prerequisite for citizenship. Therefore, these can be seen as new naturalisation criteria for certain migrants, which could mark a shift from Sweden’s previous trend towards increasingly liberal access to citizenship since the 1950s. Introduction In 2016 it was reported that 37,449 stateless people resided in Sweden, the majority of whom were refugees (Statistics Sweden, 2017). The true scale of statelessness in Sweden is unknown as the authorities do not have a statelessness determination procedure through which to accurately identify statelessness. The definition of a stateless person under international law -, “… a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law” (UN General Assembly, 1954: Article.1.1) – is not to be found in Swedish legislation. Despite this gap, a large number of asylum seekers in Sweden have been identified as being stateless, or a variation thereof. In 2015 Sweden received 9,266 asylum seekers who were recorded as either “stateless”, statslös, “stateless Palestinian”, of “unknown citizenship” Okänt medborgarskap or citizenship “under investigation” Under utredning 1 – 5.7% of the total asylum applications (Statistics Sweden, 2017). This increased to 7.7% (2,240) of the total asylum applications in 2016, though the overall number of asylum claims fell to 28,939 (ibid).2 Yet, the assessment of nationality or statelessness during the Swedish asylum procedure can only be seen as partial and has not been the subject of research. 1 The lack of law and policy on determining statelessness in Sweden makes it challenging to know with certainty if those recorded as stateless actually are so. There is also the possibility that some stateless people may not have been recognised as such. This provides us with a challenge in terms of mapping the scale and scope of statelessness in the country. For this reason, nationality categorisations other than “stateless” statslös are included in this analysis, such as those refugees recorded as having “unknown citizenship” Okänt medborgarskap or citizenship “under investigation” Under utredning, as well as some Palestinians. These categories were also included in UNHCR’s report Mapping Statelessness in Sweden as being under the organisation’s statelessness mandate (UNHCR, 2016). 2 [2] The statelessness of refugees is by no means a minor issue in either the statelessness or refugee fields. In 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported it had 14.4 million people under its refugee mandate, of which nearly one in ten (1.5 million) were stateless, (UNHCR, 2015; ISI, 2014: 125). If we were to include the Palestinians under UNRWA’s mandate, then we this would be increased to one in four refugees. While not all stateless people are refugees, or all refugees are stateless, some people do fall into both categories. This is unsurprising given that statelessness can be both the cause or consequence of forced migration (NRC and Tilburg University, 2014). 21