Sweden, Norway and Denmark on Monday suspended decisions on Syrian asylum requests and deportations after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
“Given the situation, it is simply not possible to assess the grounds for protection at this time,” Carl Bexelius, Swedish Migration Agency head of legal affairs, said in a statement.
The agency said that it would formally announce on Tuesday that no rejection of asylum requests or deportation decisions would be enforced during the suspenion. Similarly no decision on residence permits would be made.
Sweden took in the second-highest number of Syrian refugees in the European Union in 2015-2016 behind Germany, and the highest number per capita.
Of the 162,877 asylum seekers in Sweden in 2015, 51,338 were from Syria, according to Statistics Sweden.
“The situation in Syria is fragile and recent events raise several legal questions that require thorough analysis,” Bexelius said, noting that a similar decision had been taken when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021.
The Danish Refugee Appeals Board said it was putting the 69 cases regarding Syrian asylum requests it was handling on hold, citing “the very uncertain situation.”
In mid-2020, Denmark became the first European Union country to re-examine hundreds of Syrian refugee cases on the grounds that “the current situation in Damascus is no longer such as to justify a residence permit or the extension of a residence permit”.
But the country has not made any involuntary deportations to Syria.
Denmark has a very restrictive reception policy, with a stated objective of ‘zero asylum seekers’. It encourages Syrians to return voluntarily and has only issued temporary residence permits since 2015.
The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) said it had “decided to put asylum applications from Syria on hold until further notice.”
“The reason for this is the recent major events and changes in Syria. However, the situation in the country is still very unclear,” the agency said in a statement.
