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Sweden puts deportation of British woman with Alzheimer’s ‘on hold’

The Swedish Migration Agency has put the deportation of an elderly woman with Alzheimer's "on hold" pending a doctor's assessment of her health, the woman's family said on Wednesday.

Published: 5 April 2023 19:42 CEST

Sweden puts deportation of British woman with Alzheimer's 'on hold'

Sweden puts deportation of woman with Alzheimer's to UK on hold. Photo: Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP

The decision to deport 74-year-old Kathleen Poole, which has sparked outrage in the UK, had however not been repealed.

The case is one of many post-Brexit deportations of British nationals living in EU countries, with Sweden making up nearly half of them.

According to EU statistics agency Eurostat Sweden has ordered the deportation of 1,100 British nationals since Brexit, out of 2,630 Britons ordered to leave an EU or EEA country.

Swedish police last week asked the UK embassy to find a care home ready to receive and care for her in her home country.

But authorities later decided to suspend the deportation, pending the family providing new documents attesting to the old woman’s health.

In an email to the family, viewed by AFP, the UK embassy to Sweden said the Migration Agency “received a request at the end of March to stop the deportation”.

OPINION: Sweden should follow Denmark and reconsider Brexit deportations

The embassy added that while the request was being processed “the planning for the deportation continues as before, but the actual execution of the deportation is placed on hold”.

The British woman came to Sweden in 2004 to be closer to her son, daughter-in-law and their four children.

But her application to stay in Sweden – a process that became compulsory for British citizens residing in Sweden following Brexit – was rejected because her passport had not been renewed since 2018, which her family said had not been done as her illness prevented any travel.

The Briton has spent the last 10 years in a care home.

“She’s in bed having round-the-clock care. It is not right. You don’t deport someone who is as sick as she is,” her daughter-in-law Angelica Poole told AFP.

Asked for comment, the migration agency said it was unable to discuss individual cases.

The case has sparked ire in the UK with Labour MP Hilary Benn describing it as “deeply shocking,” according to newspaper The Guardian.

In early February, The Local alerted Swedish Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard to Sweden’s high deportation figures, which she in an interview with us described as “complete news” to her. She promised to look into them, saying that “we want them [Brits] here”.

We have since then repeatedly reached out to her office for further comments.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.