The National Audit Office's report on public legal counsel in migration cases

Annika Hirvonen (MP)

Mr. Speaker! In the Committee on Social Insurance, we have had to deal with a Swedish National Audit Office report examining whether the system of public legal aid in migration cases functions well.

Public counsel are often lawyers appointed to support, for example, refugees seeking asylum. It is a group with a particularly great need for skilled counsel who can guide them through the Swedish legal process that the asylum review is. It begins at the Migration Agency with long interviews that often concern very difficult experiences. It can involve telling a caseworker in their 20s for three hours about experiences of torture, gang rape, persecution, or even witnessed murders of family members. These are terrible traumas that, through interpreted conversations, are to be conveyed to an authority by people who have often fled from just authorities in their home countries. The importance and value of the public counsel having the competence and prerequisites to provide the support needed in this process cannot be overemphasized.

It is pleasing that the Swedish National Audit Office has concluded that much is functioning well. At the same time, the Swedish National Audit Office has concluded that there are deficiencies - that people are sometimes appointed who do not have sufficient competence.

There are also problems with spreading cases out among so many different lawyers so that each person does not get the opportunity to gain the required experience. If a person is appointed in only one or two cases per year, it becomes difficult to build up sufficient experience to truly become an expert on this very special type of processes and cases.

The Swedish National Audit Office's report on public legal counsel in migration cases

The government has taken measures, and many of those measures actually come from the Migration Committee's conclusions. It is about reviewing the suitability requirements and that they shall be applied both when one has an assistant that one has requested oneself and when it is the authority that appoints one.

It is pleasing that there is broad agreement on these measures in the Riksdag. But, Mr. Speaker, it worries me what will happen with the issue of public counsel in migration cases going forward.

We can read in the Tidö Agreement that the Tidö parties want to reduce the rights on all points, including the right to public counsel, to as low rights as possible. Despite the fact that public counsel today is a guarantee for at least a somewhat legally secure process and a security to be able to tell about the terrible traumas that often lie behind the flight or that have been experienced during the flight, the Tidö parties now write in the agreement that the right to public counsel shall be reduced as much as possible and as much as the EU allows. At the same time, they write that legal certainty is something they want to strengthen.

These are two things that cannot be reconciled. Reduced right to public counsel means reduced legal certainty in the asylum process.

Mr. Speaker! We do not yet know exactly how these writings are intended to be realized. But we in Miljöpartiet want to clearly signal that we need competent public counsel in the asylum process to guarantee legally secure asylum decisions. Otherwise, the danger is extreme that people cannot convey their experiences to the Swedish Migration Agency and the migration courts, and that people are therefore deported to persecution and, in the worst case, torture and death.

In order to be able to uphold the right to asylum, one must ensure legal certainty, and given how important the narrative of the asylum seeker is, one needs to ensure the best possible conditions for that narrative to be recounted.

With that, I move for approval of the proposal in the Social Insurance Committee's report.

The deliberation was hereby concluded.

(Decisions were made under § 21.)

The speech at riksdagen.se, in Swedish (opens in a new tab)