Back in October 2020, the UK immigration minister stood up in parliament to reassure campaigners concerned about EU citizens who weren’t aware they had to ask the Home Office to stay in the country after Brexit. Using an example of a child in foster care who might not know they were an EU citizen until they applied for their first job, the Conservative Kevin Foster said the UK would take “a generous approach as to what reasonable grounds [for failing to apply] were”. In other words, the UK/EU Brexit agreement was designed to protect those who had exercised lawful freedom of movement, and they couldn’t just be chucked out of their host state because the UK had decided to leave the EU.
The Home Office is not perfect, and is regularly criticised by campaigners for missteps over the implementation of the EU citizens chapter in the EU-UK withdrawal agreement. But “reasonable grounds” have been outlined in parliament, providing legal arguments to challengers. Yet thousands of miles away in Sweden, post-Brexit rights are being undermined with an apparent high level of removal orders for law-abiding British citizens, some at the most vulnerable stage of their lives.
One 74-year-old British man, who has been in Sweden for 25 years, is this week facing deportation despite having vascular dementia and parkinsonism, and being so incapacitated that he is in full-time care. Rejecting a legal request for him to stay using family ties, a Swedish court ruled that immigration interests trumped human rights. This week, Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old widow who has been in Sweden for 21 years, also lost her appeal to reverse a migration agency decision that she has to leave the country within four weeks.
He said he knew of people who, on receiving the removal order, just left, “too embarrassed” to fight it. The question now is whether the Conservative party failed British citizens during Brexit negotiations by not spotting the difficulties with the “constitutive” system adopted by 13 countries – including the UK and Sweden – where EU citizens (including, at the time, British citizens living elsewhere in the EU) had to make an application to stay. Others, such as Spain, opted for a “declaratory” system, whereby EU citizens just had to register their presence before Brexit.
Did the government fail to communicate this effectively to the estimated 1 million Britons in the EU? Or has the European Commission failed to enforce the withdrawal agreement to protect citizens in practice? However, the UK, the EU and Sweden must act to address them.
Words and expressions of concern won’t cut it,” said Milstead. One of the problems is lack of political interest in Sweden. Politicians in Sweden have the perfect get-out clause: legally, they are unable to interfere in any decisions made by the Migrationsverket, the Swedish migration agency.
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