Brexit was a traumatic experience for hundreds of thousands of British people living across Europe, as well as for Europeans living in the UK. People who had made their lives abroad thanks to the free movement of people risked having their worlds turned upside down. 

When dawn rose on 24th June 2016, many wondered whether they’d be able to keep their homes, their jobs, the lives they’d build up.

They were therefore reassured by the words of the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier. He was unequivocal:

“Individuals legally residing in the UK today must remain residents after withdrawal, including in those cases when people have no documents to prove residency.

Obviously, the same goes for UK nationals in the 27.

No one should be confronted with a mountain of red tape.”

Those were his words in a keynote speech in Florence on May 5, 2017. 

Nine years later, that promise has been kept by the UK and by 26 out of 27 EU countries. With just one notable exception: Sweden.

Sweden has denied residency to 4,000 people — three times more Brits than any other EU country, according to figures Sweden has supplied to the European Commission. Many of those were denied residency due to late applications, even though they had often been living legally in Sweden for decades prior to Brexit.

They include Nichola Stanlick, who has lived in Sweden since she came here as a seven-year-old in 1984. They include Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old British widow who has lived in Sweden for 21 years. They also included well-known actor Kenny Solomons, who was kicked out of the country despite having lived here since 2012. 

Happily Kenny has now found his way back and has become a Swedish citizen, but not before he had suffered five years of uncertainty. The situation for others seems far more unclear.

These are the people the EU promised to protect. They have been caught up in a combination of inflexible Swedish bureaucracy and, one suspects, a Migration Agency geared up by the government’s wider deportations policy to err on the side of kicking people out of the country. 

But Sweden is not a signatory to the UK’s Withdrawal Agreement from the EU: the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council signed on Sweden’s behalf. According to the agreement, the Commission is responsible for enforcing the agreement on member states.

The European Commission told The Local in 2024 that it is “not for the Commission” to tell Member States how strict or lenient they should be when processing late applications. 

This is a pathetic response: Brits living in Sweden during Britain’s EU membership were exercising their rights as EU citizens. The EU promised them that they would be able to stay. Sweden is betraying that promise – but not lifting a finger to help, the EU is party to that betrayal. If the European Commission places any value at all on the free movement of people, it must act before more people have their lives uprooted.