Is it legal in Sweden to make laws apply retroactively?

Local Sweden

09-04-2025

Sweden's Migration Minister Johan Forssell has said he wants to impose new stricter citizenship requirements, even applying them to applications that have already been submitted. Does this count as retroactive and, if so, is it legal?
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Is it illegal to apply a law retroactively in Sweden?
That depends. Article 10, Chapter 2 of the Instrument of Government, one of Sweden's four constitutional laws, bars governments from applying criminal law retroactively.
"No one may be sentenced to a penalty or penal sanction for an act which was not subject to a penal sanction at the time it was committed," the section on criminal law reads. Nor may anyone be sentenced to a penal sanction which is more severe than that which was in force when the act was committed."
This essentially means that you can't prosecute someone for doing something which wasn't illegal at the time they did it.
There is also a partial ban on applying tax law retroactively.
"No taxes or charges due the State may be imposed except inasmuch as this follows from provisions which were in force when the circumstance arose which occasioned the liability for the tax or charge," the tax passage reads.
Again, this essentially means that you can't change the law and claim taxes from prior to the law change if they wouldn't have been owed under the old rules.
There is, however, no ban on retroactive legislation in administrative law, which covers things like migration law, including the proposed changes to citizenship requirements.
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How does the government intend to apply its new citizenship law?
A government inquiry recommended at the end of January that the new stricter citizenship rules, which among other things will increase the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 8 years, should not apply to applications which have already been made.
It recommended instead that people who submit their citizenship application before the new law comes into force on June 1st, 2026, have their applications handled under current rules, essentially calling for a period of transitional rules so that people would have their applications processed under the laws that were in place when they applied.
But Sweden's Migration Minister Johan Forssell said at the start of February that the government did not intend to follow this recommendation.
"I think that it is important when we are overhauling the whole rulebook on citizenship that these changes apply immediately," he said, citing security concerns.
Given case processing times for citizenship applications of up to three years, this means that people who have already applied for citizenship now, fulfilling the current five-year residency requirement, are likely to be judged under the eight-year rule by the time their case is decided.
They will also have to meet other proposed requirements, like language and culture tests and a self-sufficiency requirement.
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Does this count as retroactive?
At a press conference last month, The Local asked Forssell to address the "erosion of trust" in Swedish migration policy due to rules on citizenship and residency being applied "retroactively".
"First of all, we're not doing any retroactive changes. That has never been the case," he responded. A "lack of transitional rules" was, he argued "not the same thing as retroactive legislation".
Experts The Local contacted were divided over this.
Joakim Nergelius, a professor at Örebro University who is one of Sweden's foremost experts on constitutional law, argued that if a new stricter rule applied to applications which have already been made at a time when other rules were in place, this would count as retroactive.
"The minister is wrong," he said. "If the application is already made before the law is changed and the new law is then applied, then it's a case of retroactivity."
Vilhelm Persson, Professor in Constitutional Law at Lund University, agreed that "in some sense it would be retroactive" if an application were to be judged on rules that were not in place when it was submitted.
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But Jane Reichel, Professor in Administrative Law at Stockholm University, said that within administrative law this did not count as retroactive, and was indeed, standard practice.
"The main rule in Swedish administrative law is that the law that is in place at the time that a decision is taken is the law that every agency needs to apply," she said.
While governments do in practice add transition rules so that already existing applications are treated under the previous law in place, failing to do so did not count as retroactive legislation.
In administrative law, she said, what would count as retroactive would be to, for example, "add a criterion for Swedish citizenship and then apply that to those who already have been granted citizenship".
She said this principle applied even in cases where an administrative decision has taken, and then appealed, with the law changing between the point at which the administrative decision is taken and the point at which it comes before a court for review.
"Even there, the main rule is that the court should judge the case according to the law that is applicable at the time of their decision," she said.