On 13 October 2016, Swedish Ministry of Justice together with the Swedish Migration Agency organized an EMN conference entitled Resettlement in Sweden and Europe – What Works?. Different national approaches and initiatives in this field were compared during the conference, information on the Swedish resettlement program was provided, and possible ways forward, such as a common Resettlement Framework for the EU and the project EUFRANK (Facilitating Resettlement and Refugee Admission through New Knowledge) were outlined.
The conference commenced by the speech of Kerstin Lindblad from the Swedish Ministry of Justice and Oskar Ekblad from the Swedish Migration Board. Kerstin Lindblad informed the attendants that Sweden plans to increase its resettlement quota from the current 1900 to 3400 persons in 2017 and 5000 in 2018.
Peter O'Sullivan from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spoke about resettlement as a solution to large-scale refugee crises. In 2015, 81 893 refugees were resettled to 30 different countries. The resettled refugees came mainly from Myanmar, Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Among countries welcoming the highest numbers of resettled refugees were USA (52 583), Canada (10 236) and Australia (5 211). 13 040 persons were resettled to EU Member States. Aleksandar Romanovič from the European Commission spoke about the Union Resettlement Framework which was proposed by the European Commission in July 2016. The proposal aims to set up a permanent resettlement framework for the EU with common rules on admission, resettlement procedures, status granted to the resettled persons, financial support to the resettling EU Member States and decision-making procedures for the implementation of the framework. Hanne Beirens from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Europe highlighted that there is a need to generate more knowledge about the costs of resettlement especially for the countries new to resettlement as well as about the efficiency of resettlement for the existing resettling countries. At the end of the panel, results from the EMN Study “Resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes in Europe – what works?” were presented.
The second panel compared national programmes in EU Member States, particularly UK, Germany, Italy and Lithuania. It demonstrated how different countries use different resettlement frameworks. Germany, for example, operates besides standard resettlement programme, also humanitarian admission programme for Syrians, admission procedure for Afghan local staff (for local staff members at risk due to their activities for German agencies) as well as private sponsorship programme through which 21 500 Syrians were resettled in total.
The third panel provided an overview of the Swedish resettlement programme. Among speakers were Martin Söderström and Mattias Sjolund from the municipality of the Swedish town Åre which with its population of 10 500 receives 100 refugees per year.
More information about the conference as well as presentations are available at the Swedish EMN NCP website.