When Sweden tightened its citizenship laws on June 6th, the roughly 100,000 applicants already in the queue were judged overnight against new and much harsher rules than before. Anna Bärlund, an AI consultant originally from Russia, was one of them. She had applied for citizenship back in 2023 – long before any bill to change the rules was put forward by the government.
She had also had a request to conclude her case granted by a court in the spring of 2025, which is meant to fast-track your application, but often doesn’t work as intended and has been criticised by the Migration Agency and authorities for clogging up the system.
“The only thing they did [in response] was that they took away my passport, and I had to live for more than a year without my passport, without being able to travel to see my relatives, to see my friends, or do any work abroad, which was very important for me as well,” she said.
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Married to a Swede, Bärlund and others like her are the ones hardest hit by the changes, with the residency requirement for partners more than doubling from three to seven years. And so, after having waited almost three years, just nine days after the new citizenship laws came into force, the Migration Agency finally finished processing her case. Rejected.
“I cried, if I’m honest, because it felt so deeply unfair,” she said.
But she appealed, and on October 7th, the Migration Court in Malmö ruled in her favour.
“The Migration Court overturns the appealed decision and remits the case back to the Migration Agency for further processing,” reads the court decision, read by The Local.
Due to her long wait, Bärlund was rejected right at the finishing line, when she was just three months away from meeting the new seven-year requirement. As a result, she ended up reaching those seven months while waiting for her appeal to be processed by the court.
“Upon review of the case documents, the Migration Court notes that Anna Bärlund's period of habitual residence in Sweden now exceeds seven years,” the decision continues.
READ ALSO: Migration court rules that new Swedish citizenship requirements apply to pending applications
Essentially, the ruling indicates that an applicant has to meet the new rules by the time a court makes a decision on their appeal, even if they did not meet them when the Migration Agency made their decision. This is an existing legal principle, but it was not yet clear whether or not it would apply in cases relating to the lack of transitional citizenship rules.
Youstbi Djuanvat, a lawyer for Edelweiss Legal KB, which represented Bärlund, welcomed the judgment, but warned that the Migration Agency could still appeal it, so the ruling is not set in stone.
“I spoke with my client today and we are ready to fight this in the court of appeal if the Migration Agency decides to challenge the court decision,” he told The Local.
But he said that the ruling does suggest that rejected citizenship applicants who are close to meeting the new requirements might benefit from appealing their rejection.
“Absolutely, and it can be applied in different circumstances. If you do not fulfil the language or civic knowledge requirement, then maybe you can appeal that and then you complete your SFI and by the time you finish, you just send it to the court and say ‘there you go, now I fulfil the requirement – I would like my citizenship’,” he said. “But again, this decision is not final, so we don’t yet know the final outcome.”
In any case, Bärlund will still have to show that she meets all the other requirements for citizenship. She just took a Swedish test to be able to demonstrate her knowledge of the language, but she doesn’t know when she might get a chance to sit the civics test.
“I have mixed feelings. I feel good in the sense that someone would feel if they won something, but I don’t feel relieved. I don’t feel overjoyed, simply because I know it’s (...) going to be a long and stressful process now with the Migration Agency,” she said. “I’m just gearing up to get ready for the next steps. That’s how I feel.”
She still feels stressed and uncertain about the future and isn’t sure she wants to stay in Sweden, partly because she feels betrayed by the lack of transitional citizenship rules. But what’s even more important to her is the things that were said by politicians in the debate.
“All immigrants were called criminals (...) and there was just a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to the election. I’m just fundamentally unsure that I want to bring up my child in such rhetoric and environment,” she said. “So that’s a question mark.”