mono

This morning, seven-year old Nadina Imamovic and her mother left Sweden for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Dagens Nyheter).

Nadina and her mother came to Sweden from Bosnia in February 2001 as refugees, and immediately applied for residence permits. In this sense, they were just two people among the tens of thousands of people who sought to stay in Sweden that year.

However, Nadina suffers from a rare and serious eye disease, and will most certainly turn blind unless she receives expert treatment. According to Swedish medical experts, such treatment is not available in Bosnia.

Several people in Sweden pledged with the Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) to let her stay for humanitarian reasons, but to no avail. The case also received considerable media coverage. A legal process was then initiated between Nadina and the Aliens Appeals Board (Utlänningsnämnden), which is the authority responsible to review appeals against decisions by the Swedish Migration Board. After eight rejections, the ruling was appealed to the Swedish Administrative Court of Appeals in Stockholm (Kammarrätten i Stockholm).

On July 18 this year, the court rejected the appeal.

It has been argued and ruled that there are no "special reasons " to let Nadina and her mother stay in Sweden. It has also been argued that if she was allowed to stay, it would be unfair to other refugees who have had their applications turned down for various reasons (I know of no other identical case), and so on and so forth. In short, there has been a lot of arguing and referal to laws and regulations, where instead there should have been flexibility and compassion.

The arguments against letting Nadina stay are interesting though.

In 2001, 54,096 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina were awarded residence permits. Given the speed at which the Migration Board works, or rather lack thereof, most if not all of these people must have arrived prior to 2001. However, this indicates an inconsistency in how the Migration Board rules in each case. In fact, according to the Migration Board’s website, "a total of 44,664 persons were granted residence permits in Sweden in 2002, 7,451 of them as refugees or on other protective grounds and for humanitarian reasons."

Again, the figure does not tell when these people arrived, but it does say that in the year of 2002, 44,664 people were seen as having more valid reasons to stay in Sweden than Nadina.

What reasons trump saving the eyesight of a seven year old girl?

As for those Bosnians who were allowed to stay last year, I suppose that some of them live in Malmö. I probably see them every day without knowing. I wonder what their reasons were.

Another sad story.