The prohibition against retroactive legislation is considered so fundamental that it is enshrined in the constitution through the Instrument of Government 2:10, in the same way that it is included as Article 11:2 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in New York.
“Stricter and clearer requirements regarding conduct for residence permits” is the latest example of the Tidö government's complete indifference to these fundamental legal principles. What they are proposing is, in fact, to turn the entire legal system upside down. Previously, certain carefully defined criminal acts could result in a deportation order; now, they instead want to focus on individual people's “conduct,” in other words their “behavior and way of life,” to quote the definition of the word in the Swedish Academy Glossary.
According to the referral to the Council on Legislation, now not only criminal acts, including “less serious, for example, isolated offenses punishable by fines,” will be able to lead to deportation, but also an individual's opinions and personal contacts; “for example, support for international terrorism, extremist sympathies, or connections to a violent extremist organization.” All of this is based on the concept of “otherwise flawed conduct,” which is defined as a person, for example, “incurring debt without any intention or effort to pay back the debts” or as “violations of rules, statutes, and authority decisions, for example, welfare fraud, undeclared work, or failing to pay fines.”
Furthermore, retroactive legislation is permitted; or as the government puts it: “In each individual case, a comprehensive assessment is made that also takes into account any previous flawed character.” What the government is doing is simply turning the concepts upside down: From the fundamental idea of the principle of legality that everything that is not forbidden, at least purely legally, is permitted, to that everything the individual does or has done, regardless of the wording of the law, can be considered forbidden – if the Swedish Migration Agency's character assessment finds it to be so.
The Tidö government has simply drafted a catch-all clause that most of all resembles the legislation in the former communist one-party states. There, they admittedly did not use the concept of “character” but rather “antisocial lifestyle” and the legislation was not primarily directed at “immigrants” but at domestic dissidents, but the goal is and was the same: To give the state and its institutions as far-reaching tools as possible to harass and ultimately get rid of unwanted individuals.
To illustrate the almost Kafkaesque structure of the proposed legislation, we can do the thought experiment that it had also applied to Swedish citizens. How would the government's character assessment, for example, have affected the responsible persons behind the proposal?
Johan Forsell, Minister for Migration, has obvious “connections to a violent extremist organization” through his son's previous membership in the
openly Nazi Aktivklubb Sverige. Members of the organization, which Säpo assesses as one of the country's most prone to violence, carried out several brutal assaults on so-called “immigrants” exactly during the time that the son was a member. Forsell's defense; that it is about “a deeply remorseful 15-year-old, who just turned 16” would hardly have impressed in a character investigation. The assessment, based on the wording in his own legislative proposal, could only have been one: Out he goes!
The same would have happened to Jimmie Åkesson. If he had defended the invitation of a leader of a criminal motorcycle gang to his wedding, with the justification that he was only a plus one, the Character Investigation's decision could only have been one, especially if it emerged that Åkesson's association with the motorcycle gang leader extended several years back in time: Deportation!
Ebba Busch has previously been convicted of a serious crime; gross defamation. Thus, it would hardly have mattered how many falukorv sausages she waved around to show her Swedishness; the decision would still have been the same: Out she goes!
Even Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's character assessment would probably have gone very quickly. The man who acquires a large apartment in central Stockholm, despite the fact that according to the owning foundation it is solely intended for threatened women, should not be long-lasting in Sweden.
The Conduct Investigation decision on immediate deportation would not have been difficult to make – with the justification that Kristersson had shown evidence of “behaviors that society on an overarching level counteracts”.
The examples above may seem absurd, but this is exactly how bizarrely the government's referral to the Council on Legislation is formulated. According to some calculations, up to 100,000 people with residence permits could be covered by the law, many of them having lived in Sweden for years, with an income and steady job, with children born and raised here.
The Tidö government's proposal is the latest in a bombardment of laws and legislative proposals – from the billion-kronor investment in repatriation grants to the teenage deportations – with the stated or unstated goal of not only reducing immigration but also getting out as many of those who are already here. And the government seems to completely ignore the criticism, which is as recurring as it is devastating. The Chancellor of Justice noted, for example, that previous proposals to revoke granted residence permits violate international law, while the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University summarized its criticism with the words: “[T]he inquiry's proposal [is] in conflict with the principles that make up Swedish administrative law and Swedish legal certainty. Opening up to make such a departure from the foundations of Swedish administrative law to achieve a political goal is dangerous and damages the Swedish rule of law.”
In the Middle Ages, banishment was considered one of the severest punishments the state authorities could mete out, intended only for the most heinous of crimes; such as murder or treason.
Tidö ministers to the left: Ebba Busch, Ulf Kristersson, Jimmie Åkesson. Gellert Tamas to the right.