The European court has a big backlog of complaints from Iraqi asylum seekers and doesn’t give priority to urgent cases, the Swedish Migration Board said in a statement.
The agency’s director for legal affairs, Mikael Ribbenvik, also said Sweden hasn’t received any clear guidance as to whether it should cancel all deportations of Iraqi asylum seekers or not.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe — the human rights watchdog linked with the European court — criticized European countries for deporting Iraqi asylum seekers, saying it violates a decision by the court.
However, while the Netherlands has received official instructions from the court to cancel all deportations to Iraq, Sweden has not, Ribbenvik said. Instead, it received a letter with unclear instructions that it should cancel deportations to Baghdad and “certain other provinces,” he said.
“This is stipulated by law. If the court sends us such an order, we would follow it,” he said. “But there are established channels of communication for these things, you can’t communicate via press releases.” Sweden assesses asylum seekers from Iraq on an individual basis and so far this year, about half of them have been denied asylum. They can then appeal the decision to the European Court of Human Rights, which is currently reviewing more than 200 such cases from Sweden.
Although security has improved in Iraq since the height of sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007, human rights groups have urged governments not to force Iraqis who fled the country to return, citing continued attacks and rights violations.
Following a series of attacks against Iraq’s Christian minority in Iraq, rights groups have specifically urged governments to grant asylum to Christian Iraqis.
On Tuesday, Sweden stopped the planned deportation of 40 Iraqi asylum seekers because it was unsure about the guidance from the European court.
The European Court of Human Rights referred all questions to the Council of Europe, which didn’t return calls seeking comment.
