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NATO

Sweden’s NATO bid hit by repeated rows with Turkey

Sweden's bid for NATO membership is facing a dead end because Ankara's demands to Stockholm to hand over Kurdish activists and prevent rallies attacking Turkey's leadership have strained ties.

Sweden's NATO bid hit by repeated rows with Turkey
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson (L) hold a press conference following their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Ankara on November 8, 2022. Photo: Adem ALTAN/AFP

The chances of this changing after Turkey’s parliamentary elections due in mid-May are uncertain, said Paul Levin, director of Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. “We can now probably forget Turkish ratification before the elections, which seem to be scheduled for May 14,” Levin told AFP. “What happens after that depends in part on who wins.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s objections to Sweden’s NATO membership rest largely on Stockholm’s refusal to extradite Turkish nationals Ankara wants to prosecute for “terrorism”. And Erdogan is running for re-election.

In December, Sweden extradited a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to Turkey. He had been convicted in a Turkish court and denied asylum in Sweden.

Erdogan wants more action from Stockholm against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies.

READ ALSO: Anti-Turkey demo in Sweden deepens tensions over NATO bid

“On one hand, there is a Turkish president who has jailed thousands over alleged insults and who wants to divert attention from a poor economy in the months before an election,” said Levin. “On the other hand, there are groups in Sweden who are against NATO membership and PKK supporters worried about the government’s pledges to go after” them, he said.

Levin said these PKK supporters had realised they could provoke Erdogan “by insulting him and thereby stall the accession process”.

Protests in Sweden

A protest by a far-right politician in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm on Saturday — authorised by the police — has further strained relations.

Rasmus Paludan is a Swedish-Danish activist who has already been convicted for racist abuse.

He provoked rioting in Sweden last year when he went on a tour of the country and publicly burned copies of the Koran.

On Saturday, he burned another copy of the Muslim holy book after a speech of almost an hour denouncing Islam.

Police based their decision to authorise the protest on the basis of Sweden’s liberal constitution, which protects the right to demonstrate.

Ankara summoned Sweden’s ambassador to register its outrage, then cancelled a visit of Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson that had been scheduled for next Friday in Ankara — a rare high-level meeting.

Earlier this month, Ankara called in Sweden’s ambassador after pro-Kurdish activists hung an effigy of Erdogan from its feet, explicitly comparing him to Benito Mussolini.

Italy’s Fascist dictator was left hanging upside down after his execution in the closing days of World War II.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced it as an attempt to sabotage the country’s NATO membership bid — but that sparked a backlash from some inside Sweden defending the right to freedom of expression.

Islamist dictator’

Then last week, the leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson, whose party props up the Swedish government, denounced Erdogan as an “Islamist dictator”.

He urged Kristersson not to appease Turkey “because it is ultimately an anti-democratic system and a dictator we are dealing with”, Akesson told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

Turkey is seeking the extradition of more Kurdish “terrorists” based in Sweden. Erdogan recently said there were as many as 130 there

Stockholm has made it clear that the courts have the final say, but that does not appear to have satisfied Ankara.

Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, who last spring was talking of a fast-track membership process of just a few weeks, told AFP in January he still thought it would happen in 2023, even if he could not guarantee it.

Both Turkey and Hungary were still to ratify the bid, he pointed out. Both countries have maintained links with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, with Ankara in particular adopting the role of mediator between the two sides.

One spark of hope for Sweden is that Finland, which also launched its bid to join NATO following the Russian invasion, has made it clear that it does not want to enter the alliance without its “big brother”.

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WORK PERMITS

Sweden’s Migration Agency rejects role in work permit salary threshold exemption plan

Sweden's Migration Agency has rejected a call for it to be responsible for drawing up a list of in-demand skills and professions exempted from the coming median-salary requirement for a work permit.

Sweden's Migration Agency rejects role in work permit salary threshold exemption plan

In the conclusions to a government inquiry into setting the median salary threshold, judge Ann-Jeanette Eriksson proposed that the Migration Agency be made responsible for drawing up annual national and regional lists of professions which should be exempted from the threshold.

The list of proposed exemptions could then, she recommended, either be passed to the government for a final decision, or else apply immediately. 

In its response to consultation, the Migration Agency said that it did not believe that it was the right agency to draw up the list. 

“The Migration Agency considers that the task of preparing these proposals should be given to the Swedish Public Employment Service which is the expert agency on labour market issues,” the agency said. 

“As the expert agency, the Swedish Public Employment Service has much broader competence when it comes to judging the demand for labour.”

The employment service could then consult the Migration Agency and other relevant agencies before passing the list to the government, it recommended. 

READ ALSO:

The Swedish Public Employment Service did not echo the Migration Agency’s call in its own response. 

It did, however, recommend an alternative system proposed by Eriksson, under which the Migration Agency, rather than the government, would have the final say on which jobs should be exempted. 

“The alternative proposal would mean a simpler process and shorter handling time”, the service said. 

The Migration Agency, however, said it did not support this alternative proposal, without giving any reasons for this.

It did call for a consideration over “whether it might be necessary to consult with other authorities before the proposals are made to the government”.

The agency also called for more specific language on what “considerations around migration law” it should apply when deciding on which professions to exempt. 

In some of its comments on the detail or proposals, the Migration Agency highlighted that the law should specify that work permit applicants need to be offered a salary that meets or exceeds Sweden’s median salary “at the time of application”, and also called for more specifics on how to define a “monthly salary”.

  • Don’t miss any Swedish work permit news from The Local by downloading our app (available on Apple and Android) and then selecting Work Permits in your Notification options via the User button

Eriksson also recommended that Migration Agency be tasked with deciding which industries should be entirely excluded from the work permit system because they have historically had problems with the exploitation of labour migrants and abuse of the work permit system.  

“The possibility of excluding certain groups of jobs is an important tool in the work against exploitation in the workplace,” the agency said of this proposal.

But it said that to carry out this task properly, it would need more information on what criteria should be applied when making such exclusions as well as increased powers to cooperate and share information with other agencies involved in combatting exploitation and abuse in the workplace. 

“For this work to be even more effective, more tools are needed that enable more thorough controls. This is both about developing regulations that provide the Migration Agency with wider powers to carry out checks that facilitate cooperation and information exchange between relevant authorities and organisations,” it said. 

When it comes to the impact of the proposals on its own internal workings, the agency said it agreed broadly with the Eriksson’s judgement that they would not increase the workload at the agency.

The extra work required to carry out its new tasks would, it said, be largely offset by the lower work load following from the proposed abolition of the spårbyte, or “track change” system which allows rejected asylum seekers to stay in the country and apply for work permits. 

It did warn, however, that the changes could lead to even longer processing times for work permit applications. 

“The Migration Agency would like to highlight that the proposed changes to the law, and in particular the salary threshold and the regional and national exemptions from this threshold might affect handling times for work permit cases,” it wrote. 

“The regulatory framework around labour migration is already complex today and involves several decision points. Judging whether an application concerns a job for which there is a national or regional shortage will require a new decision point which will require education and preparation.” 

To reduce the extra demand on resources, the agency called on the government to make the regulation “as precise as possible”, leaving as little room as possible for different interpretations, which would then allow the agency to speed up processing and even digitalise some decisions. 

If the plans to raise the work permit salary threshold from 80 percent of the median salary to 100 percent go through, the idea is that they would come into effect in June next year (although work permit holders renewing their permits would get a one-year grace period).

But the proposal has received a slew of criticism from Swedish business organisations, which argue that it would make it harder to fill essential roles and attract international talent.

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