It’s twelve minutes into my interview with Susanna Fonsell, the Migration Agency’s legal chief, and it isn’t exactly going great. I have asked her four times a very simple question: 'what income requirements apply to British citizens seeking post-Brexit residency?' And each time she's started talking about something else.
"I think we start with the fact that Brexit changes the law completely and that when the UK left the EU, the previous automatic right to live here ended," she says the first time I ask, before talking about the "information campaigns" the agency ran to inform British citizens".
"That's not my question", I say, again asking about the income requirements.
"We have done case reviews, and the Swedish Migration Agency sees no indication that Sweden has, in any way, interpreted the withdrawal agreement in an extreme manner or differently from other member states," she says.
I repeat the question again.
"I'm not a specialist," she says. "But that's very hard to tell because, as I told you, the Migration Agency does not maintain its own own statistics or follow updates on how individual EU countries decide their cases."
"I'm not asking about individual EU countries," I retort. "I'm asking about Sweden. How how do you interpret the salary and remuneration requirements for post-Brexit residency?".
"We at the Swedish Migration Agency are satisfied with its work regarding the implementation of the UK withdrawal from the EU," she says.
By now I’m beginning to wonder if it's down to garbled, rambling questioning in what is, after all, her second language, because she's evading the question, or because she simply doesn't know.
"Are you saying that that you can't tell me what the employment requirements are for post-Brexit residence?" I ask, finally losing some of my patience. "I'm just wondering what the rules are."
"There are many different rules," she replies. "And that is not about Brexit, it's about the the general standards of Swedish law."
This gives me what I'm looking for – at least partially – as the key point according to lawyers I've spoke to, is that it is not the "general standards of Swedish law" that apply to post-Brexit residency, but the more lenient ones specified for residence under EU law.
When I push her on this, Fonsell again tells me that the Agency has conducted case reviews and found “no indication that Sweden has in any way interpreted the Withdrawal Agreement in an extreme manner or differently from other member states”.
How can you know this, I ask, if you can't tell me what the rules are?
At this point she falls back on the courts. The Migration Court, she says, has repeatedly upheld the Agency’s decisions. “The fact that Swedish courts agree with our decision shows that we are applying the law correctly."
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It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to get answers from the Migration Agency on how it interprets the law. I’d first requested an interview with Fonsell’s predecessor back in 2024, but the agency declined after I sent a list of questions that included the income requirement. Two attempts to interview Fonsell herself were subsequently cancelled before we finally spoke in September.
So I'm genuinely grateful to finally get the chance to talk to her.
But the residency requirement question isn't the only one that hasn't gone as planned. I'd started by asking her why Sweden is an outlier in the EU, seeming to refuse far more British citizens post-Brexit residency than any other country.
"The difference is so great," I emphasised as strongly as I could, "that you can't just say different countries compile their statistics differently. It requires further explanation."
She then went on to tell me exactly what I've asked her not to – that different countries compile their statistics differently so can't be compared. Only 458 British citizens have actually been deported after being denied post-Brexit residency, she adds.
I asked if that figure also includes people denied post-Brexit residency, offered temporary Swedish residency for another reason, then deported after being refused an extension.
She started talking about how the Swedish Migration Agency does not maintain its own statistics or follow-up data on how other EU countries decide their cases.
"But I'm not talking about that,” I protested, I'm talking about whether the 458 figure includes people who were given another type of residency instead.
"Sorry, no," she said. "This is only those rejected for an application for resident status."
The next issue after the income requirement is one that several EU lawyers have told me is potentially more fundamental: proportionality. I explain that the UK Withdrawal Agreement explicitly says that all decisions should be checked to ensure that their impacts are proportionate. In the last few months, I say, we've seen several cases of people who have been living in Sweden since they were 10 years old, who made a relatively small mistake and who are being deported from the country where they've been living their whole lives.
How, I ask, can that be proportionate?
"But that principle cannot override the fundamental requirements of the law," she insists.
Surely it can, I retort. Isn’t that what the proportionality clause means? It means that if the result is disproportionate, then it should override the requirements of the law.
"Yes," she says. "But not when it comes to late applications, and not when it comes to work permits, or when it comes to the standards for family reunion."
When I ask her for examples where the proportionality principle might apply, she instead starts talking about what might constitute "reasonable grounds" for a late application, saying this might include situations where someone made a mistake in their application and no one got back to ask them to correct it, or where they had had a "serious and prolonged illness".
Why, I ask, wouldn't this apply to John Sellers, the Brit deported despite living in Sweden for 24 of his 34 years. He made a mistake, by applying for Swedish citizenship rather than post-Brexit residency, and no one got back to him to correct it.
In his case, she argues, "the individual has significant responsibilities for staying informed about the applicable rules".
When I question express doubts over whether this should override the proportionality principle, she refers to the Migration Court, which rejected Sellers’s appeal and, she says, “concluded that the Swedish Migration Agency has had grounds for its position”.
I ask her about Joyce Thomas, the 78-year-old woman facing deportation because she and her late husband missed the deadline, who was then denied residency as a family member of her adult son.
"I understand that it's a very difficult situation for her," she says, before adding that there were no reasonable grounds for late application in her case and that Sweden has "very strict rules" for family reunion with adult family members.
"We can't as an authority create our own rules or make exceptions, and the legal system must be based on rules and not emotion," she says.
This sounds reasonable, only what I am questioning is precisely that: whether the Migration Agency actually is applying the rules correctly. Emotion has nothing to do with it.
Then I turn to a third case: Nichola Stanlick, who was refused post-Brexit residency despite applying on time.
In this case, Fonsell declared, there is no doubt that the Migration Agency’s rejection decision was correct.
“The agreement only protects those who held a valid right of residence on that specific day, and because Nicola chose to resign from a job, no matter why she did that, then she immediately lost her right of residence under EU rules and therefore lacked protection when Brexit took effect.”
When I get off the phone after this 45-minute exchange, I’m kicking myself for not being better briefed on the details of the three cases we’d talked about. I feel I’ve barely got anything out of her at all, that it has been a total disaster.
But when I share the transcript with EU lawyers it turns out to be more meaningful than I’d thought.
One lawyer, who wants to remain anonymous, says Fonsell’s answers are “deeply troubling”, raising serious questions about whether the Migration Agency “recognises the applicability of even basic rules of EU law”.
Fabrizio Vittoria Beijer, a partner at Momentius LPA specialising in EU law and one of the lawyers I speak to, rejects point after point, disagreeing with Fonsell on the income requirements for residency, on the proportionality clause, and on Nichola Stanlick’s case.
Where Fonsell says income requirements for post-Brexit residency are defined by “the general standards of Swedish law”, Vittoria Beijer states that it is “very clear that EU law continues to apply”.
He firmly rejects her claim that the proportionality clause does not apply to cases of late application, work permits or family reunion. The Withdrawal Agreement, he says, spells out that a proportionality assessment is required in every individual case.
While Sweden was right to check that Brits residing in Sweden before the deadline met the conditions for residence, he says, “invoking that general administrative objective does not, by itself, establish that refusing a particular late application is proportionate”.
The reason, he adds, why Article 18 on late applications was included in the UK Withdrawal Agreement was precisely because "they wanted to introduce flexibility".
"It says very clearly that it has to be assessed in accordance with the applicant's personal circumstances, which is a way to accept that a proportionality principle is applicable to this specific situation."
The other lawyer says that lawyers working in Sweden's central government have in preparatory work for a bill, given an “absolutely perfect, fully correct explanation of what the EU law principle of proportionality is”, an explanation, they say Fonsell appears not to have taken on board.
“It isn’t disapplying the law to impose a proportionality test,” they argue. “It is necessarily required in order to complete the application of the law as the final step.”
In the case of Stanlick, Vittoria Beijer argues that Fonsell is "absolutely wrong" that she “immediately lost her right of residence” when she resigned from her job, as she could have had residence rights for any number of other reasons, and would anyway likely have already qualified for permanent residence.
Rather than counting backwards five years from the Brexit deadline and basing residency rights on Stanlick's situation over that period, under EU law the agency should instead have counted forward from the time when she first had legal residence in Sweden.
"They cannot count only the last five years," he says. "After the first five years, you are supposed to have permanent residency like a normal European citizen. So I do not really understand how the agency can ask for these kind of documents when the person has been living here for 40 years and already obtained permanent residence in Sweden long before Brexit."
Finally, Vittoria Beijer questions Fonsell’s tactic, used several times in the interview, of arguing that just because the courts have upheld the agency’s decisions they must have been right.
“Whether the courts have correctly applied the Withdrawal Agreement and the relevant EU-law principles can only be determined by examining the facts and reasoning in each individual case," he says.
When I ask him to sum up his reactions, he picks up on something Fonsell says almost in passing.
"She says 'I'm not a specialist', but how can you not be a specialist if you are dealing with these kind of cases? She might not be a specialist in Brexit, but she should be a specialist in European law. She should know about it."