Tag: border

Border restrictions may be a’changin

Nordic countries and covid
Sweden’s neighbors less than delighted with Swedish tourists
pic: Nordiclifescience.org

Sweden’s borders aren’t closed, and everyone is welcome to Sweden. Swedes, on the other hand, are not at all welcome in any one of countries it borders. No one wants Sweden’s infection rate to become their infection rate. Or, as the Finnish Minister for home affairs Maria Ohisalo put it in DN, “We must continue to be pretty careful. Finland has sacrificed a lot to decrease infections.”

And now for some covid statistics

In other words, they’re not going to blow all their hard work keeping their death toll down just to let Swedes come in and infect them with covid. (Finland’s stats: 7,234 covid cases, 329 deaths.)

The same attitude has also been found in Norway, (Norwegian stats: 8,954 covid cases, 251 dead), and Denmark (Danish stats: 12,916 covid cases, and 609 deaths).

Sweden’s stats (73,858 covid cases and 5,482 dead) are just not impressing our neighbors for some reason. The hope that herd immunity would quickly establish itself or that the economy would be spared has so far not impressed anyone either. The New York Times quotes Jacob F. Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, saying “They literally gained nothing. It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”

These negative reviews have really gotten the dander up of Sweden’s leading politicians and the Swedish Public Health Authority. And quite possibly, the border situations will soon change.

border restrictions changing

SvD reports, that Denmark is now lightening up on their restrictions. Swedes living in Skåne, Blekinge and Västerbotten may be allowed over the border starting Saturday morning. Norway’s leading daily paper Verdens Gang reports that also Norway might open its borders to Swedes living in Skåne, Blekinge and Kronoberg. (Apparently, Västerbotten and Kronoberg are not considered same same to Norway and Denmark.) Finland will get back to us in about two weeks when they review their restrictions again.

10 Oct. – Danish border controls, and more

Hi, why’re you coming to Denmark today?
pic: thelocal.dk

Going from Sweden to Denmark? Bring some good ID, because new border controls are on the way. In response to an uptick in explosions in the Copenhagen area (13 this year, according to DN today), the Danish government will be instituting random ID checks on train, ferry and car crossing points starting November 12th.

This is only one measure in a packet of measures to combat crime that were announced in Denmark today. Although the Danes are not saying that Sweden is the source of their crime wave, they were certainly not pleased that at least two serious crimes were committed by Swedes criminals in Denmark recently (see this post).

Swedish police have been checking the IDs of travelers from Denmark to Sweden since 2015, in the beginning because of immigration issues with non-Danes, not Danish criminality. The border controls have since been justified as a way of averting terror attacks. Minister for Home Affairs Mikael Damberg said he welcomed Danish efforts to fight crime in the Öresund region, and took the opportunity to mention that, by the by, house break-ins went down in south Sweden after Sweden instituted its border controls (SvD.se/Damberg). (They did?)

Among other things, the new Danish measures will allow more cameras, will allow digital recognition of license plates, and make an attack on an official building also an attack on the Danish state. Also the punishment for possession of explosive material will be more severe.

Damberg, being part of the more right-wing flank of the Social Democratic party, might just be looking a little more green than red when looking at the Danish measures. Similar (if less strong) crime-fighting ideas for Sweden were dashed when the multi-party talks failed in mid September (see posts here and here).

Having border controls between two EU countries goes against EU rules, and exceptions like the Swedish-Danish border must be approved and be temporary. The current Swedish border controls expire on November 11th – (coincidentally?) the day before Denmark’s are supposed to kick in. Sweden has had border controls for Denmark and Germany in place for four years, but it’s getting harder to keep justifying them, even for terror reasons. Government coalition partner the Green party is opposed to the border controls.

Still, Sweden and Denmark are hardly alone in re-constructing borders within the previously border-less EU. According to a roundup by DN here, France has a 4 meter high fence in Calais to prevent migrants gaining access to the Channel Tunnel. There are also fences of various construction along Hungary’s southern border, between Austria and Slovenia, between Slovenia and Croatia and between North Macedonia and Greece.

More than ever, Sweden’s own Ylva Johansson, the likely EU Home Affairs Commissioner, will have her work cut out for her on the issue of migration.

Thurs. 15/8 – Denmark resists acclimatization

the Denmark-Sweden border
pic: bbc.co.uk

Denmark’s PM Mette Fredriksen announced yesterday afternoon that Denmark may soon be instituting border controls between Sweden and Denmark (). In remarks to the press, Fredriksen said that this latest incident, the large explosion at the Danish Tax Agency where two people were mildly injured, is the second time this summer a Swede has been involved in a serious crime in Denmark. (The first time that she alludes to was in June when two Swedes were killed outside of Copenhagen in a shooting that is understood to have been gang-related. ) There is no way, Fredriksen stated, that Denmark was going to get “acclimatized to explosions,” a sentence that many feel was an intentional jab at Sweden and its surprisingly common crime MO.

Sweden already has border checks by the Danish border in place, but this has been a one-way check, from the Danish border coming into Sweden. The criminal component of what is normally a job-related commute may now make controls mutual. Fredriksen isn’t after commuters, she says, but adds that “it can’t be so that people can travel from Sweden to Denmark and plant dynamite in Copenhagen” ().

The Prime Minister’s comments come on the heels of another testy exchange between Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg and Swedish minister Anders Ygeman just the other day, regarding whose far-right extremists come from where (see this blog post). Fortunately for Fredriksen, the Swedish reponse was more tempered this time – Sweden’s Minister for Home Affairs Mikael Damberg said he could understand that Denmark would want to protect itself from criminals.

The 22-year old Swede who is in police custody and who is suspected of involvement in the explosion (the other Swedish suspect is still wanted and on the run), has requested that he not be extradited to Denmark, SvD reports (). Reports as to why are sketchy, but his request now has to be handled by the courts, and not by the police. This could take time.

It seems that Swedish commuters will have to be the ones to acclimatize – to border checks.