A society for support of youth who sought asylum as unaccompanied minors
Stöttepelaren was founded in September 2017 by members from the network Stoppa utvisningarna av afghanska ungdomar! (Stop deportations of Afghan youth!). The aim is to fund and distribute support for youth who sought asylum in Sweden as unaccompanied minors. We primarily direct the support to such young persons of Afghan origin who do not get any support from state, municipalities or other organisations.
The organisation consists of about twenty local groups throughout Sweden. The members of the local groups and their network have good knowledge about the unaccompanied youths in the area and their needs. The collected money is primarily used for food, clothes, medicine and tickets for local transport, and sometimes for short time sleeping places and other special needs.
The money comes almost exclusively from private donors and is unabridged used for supporting the youths. The only administrative costs are those for bank service and webpage. All work, centrally as well as locally, is done by unpaid volunteers. All money is handled through the organisation’s central bank account and is from there distributed to the local groups, who give accounts for the use. Stöttepelaren is registered as an “ideell förening” (charity organisation without tax duty) at the Swedish tax authority.
Stöttepelaren has a public Facebook page and a webpage.
Stöttepelaren is eligible to receive grants from Charity Aid Foundation (CAF) America, which transfers gifts from US donors and checks the receivers. This means that US donors can make donations to Stöttepelaren and have this accepted in their tax declarations.
Stöttepelaren in CAF
For more information and relevant documents, please contact the chair person ordforande@stottepelaren.se.
Donations from abroad
IBAN: SE2150000000053681106576
BIC: ESSESESS
Organization number
from Swedish Tax Agency: 802511-3047
More material in English about the refugee situation in Sweden is found at Stoppa utvisningarna till Afghanistan! (Stop the deportations to Afghanistan!) and at Den onödiga flyktingkrisen (the Unnecessary Refugee Crisis).
The legal (in)security in Swedish asylum assessments is the name of the new report that has been handed over to the State Treasury and the Migration Agency’s Director General Maria Mindhammar. The report is now translated to English.
The government has commissioned the Swedish Agency for Public Management to review the asylum process at the Migration Agency, with the aim of ‘strengthening the quality, consistency, and legal security’. In particular, the handling of LGBTQI persons and converts should be looked into.
We who have been committed to the refugees since 2016 welcome this investigation. At the same time, we want to emphasize that there is legal uncertainty that affects all groups of refugees.
In 2021, we were the editors of the book The unnecessary refugee crisis – legal security, civil society and refugees 2015 – 2021, where around fifty co-authors shed light on various areas of the enforced crisis. In section 4, The Hollow Legal Security, the Migration Agency’s investigations including age assessments and the handling of children, LGBTQI people and apostates are described, among other things.
We have now made a summary and update of the book’s section 4, The Hollow Legal Security. The new report English version is called The legal (in)security in Swedish asylum assessments. From more than twenty aspects, we give an account of the legal uncertainty in the Migration Agency’s asylum investigations that we ourselves have taken part in or that we have been informed about in other ways.
The topics covered include assessments of asylum seekers’ stories, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the handling of traumatized persons and discrimination against Afghan citizens. The report contains many case descriptions and a number of references.
We have found that the Migration Agency not only violates Swedish law, but also its own guidelines and UNHCR’s recommendations.
The author of the report is Ingrid Eckerman, founder of the network Stop the deportations to Afghanistan! and Karin Fridell Anter, chairman of Stöttepelaren (the Supporting pillar), a support association for unaccompanied children and young people.
The editors for The Unnecessary Refugee Crisis have supported the report: in addition to the authors, also Carin Flemström, Birgitta Göransson, Jan Stattin and Solveig Freudenthal. Among the demands that the editors place on the Swedish Migration Agency is structured training and supervision for all case managers. The editors also support the Swedish National Audit Office’s demand for increased resources for the Migration Agency.
The report has also served as a basis for a complaint against the Migration Agency to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO). We hope that the report will be useful not only to those who will do the new investigation, but also to journalists and students.
Download the report in English.
Download the report in Swedish.
See also: New report: The Swedish Migration Agency underestimates the risks for returnees to Afghanistan June 2023
Dr. Karin Fridell Anter, one of the editors for Den onödiga flyktingkrisen (The Unnecessary Refugee Crisis), participated on May 2, 2021, in a webinar about the situation of Afghan refugees in Europe and Afghans who have been forcibly returned. The webinar was organized by AMASO, Afghan Migrant Advice Support Organization.
Listen to Dr. Karin’s presentation
Listen to the webinar
By Karin Fridell Anter and Ingrid Eckerman, July 2020
During 2015, Sweden received 165,000 refugees, an extremely high number for a small country with 10 million inhabitants. The Swedish government was terrified of the influx and closed the borders in January 2016. In July 2016, a new “temporary refugee law” was introduced, applied retroactively from November 2015. The goal was to make it possible to reject about half of the asylum seekers.
Two big groups were the refugees from Syria and from Afghanistan. The Swedish Migration Agency decided to handle the refugees from Syria first, as their cases were regarded as simple.
Of the group with Afghan citizenship, unaccompanied minors were a big group of 23,500. For those, the asylum process started late and ended late. In 2017, a new, non-validated, method for medical age determination was introduced, that arbitrarily raised the age of many youngsters so that they could be judged and expelled as adults.
Around 5,500 of the children got permanent residency. Another 1,000 were given temporary permits until they get 18 years. A new law, introduced in 2018, allowed around 7,000 young people a temporary residence permit for studies as they fulfilled the strict rules of arrival date and other formalities.
This leaves nearly 10,000 “unaccompanied” with rejected asylum applications. There has been heavy criticism against lack of justice in the asylum process that lead to this result, and also against the medical age determinations.
Even those youngsters who were included in the law for studies now face a severe risk of expulsion, as the corona crisis makes it impossible to get the long-term employments required for prolonged permits. To this are added around 2,000 “family children”, together with their parents.
This does not mean that 10,000 young refugees are actually “returning” to Afghanistan. For many of them, the prospect of going to Afghanistan is so frightening that they prefer to live as paperless and homeless in Sweden. Others have fled to other European countries that have a more realistic view on the “safety” of Afghanistan.
Since 2015, the number of voluntary returns to Afghanistan has gone down from few to nearly zero. A forced deportation is a complicated and expensive story, with possibilities of new appeals in court. The capacity of the detention system is limited. The amount of forced deportations to Afghanistan is growing slowly, but was only around 500 in 2019. Because of the corona pandemic, Afghanistan has stopped accepting forced deportees from Europe. To deport the Afghan citizens from Sweden with this speed would take more than 20 years.
During the many years in Sweden, many of the “unaccompanied” have developed social networks with Swedes and other fellow citizens. Many of the paperless youngsters stay in the homes of Swedes, or they move from one friend to another. Some of them manage to continue school. Of course, the tension is strong, and some cannot cope with this situation. At least 28 young people have killed themselves, and too many have got into drugs and prostitution.
Most of those who now live under the threat of deportation are young men who were children when they came to Sweden. There are also girls in a similar situation. They have become part of the Swedish society, many of them with people who see them as family members. In Afghanistan they have nothing. About half of them have no family or network there, as they have grown up as refugees in mainly Iran. For others, the family in Afghanistan represents the very threat that they fled from: the risk of being forcefully married, or even killed because they have refused to obey family rules.
During their time in Sweden, many have abandoned their traditional religion, converted to Christianity or become open atheist. Others have come out as LGBTQ persons, girls have had relations with boys and young women have met men without a veil or scarf. All this means that a “return” to Afghanistan would be dangerous.
There are also families with small children, who might even be born in Sweden, couples who have escaped their families to be able to live together, and women who have run away from men that they have been forced to marry. Afghanistan does not accept forced deportations of families with children. Sweden does not allow them to work, but forces them to move between different parts of the country and provides them with only minimum money. They are kept in a limbo, to induce them to return “voluntarily”.
During 2015, the civil society mobilized like it did during the WWII. All over the country, local groups were formed to support the refugees and introduce them into the Swedish society. From 2016, when the new “temporary law” was put into action, the groups started to support youngsters who came to age (18 years) and lost lodging, school and their appointed guardians.
New organisations popped up, working for the rights of refugees, adding to the organisations that already existed. Two organisations address those who risk deportation to Afghanistan.
The Facebook-based network Stoppa utvisningarna till Afghanistan! (Stop deportations to Afghanistan!) was founded as an appeal and a facebookgroup in 2016 to raise opinion and influence politics. As thousands of “unaccompanied” were admitted as members of the facebook group, a supporting function was added. Today, the group has 21,500 members, of whom one third are youngsters. The website has developed and contains facts and information as well as a variety of blog texts. Press releases and Twitter are used for spreading information.
Contact: Ingrid Eckerman ingrid.eckerman@gmail.com, +46 70 557 31 93
During 2017, it was obvious that the situation for the youngsters was becoming acute as they lost shelter and economic allowance. Members of the network founded the registered organisation Stöttepelaren (The support pillar) to collect and distribute economic support in a safe and transparent way. During the two first two years of operation, more than 2 million SEK were collected and distributed via 20 local groups. It is mainly used for food, sometimes for medicines, winter shoes or a night at a hostel. The local groups work in networks together with the churches and their aid organisations, the Red Cross and Save the children.
Contact: Karin Fridell Anter ordforande@stottepelaren.se, +46 70 769 40 17
Both organisations have participated in different manifestations organised by other organisations. Leading members of the network have initiated Flyktingarnas dag (the Refugees’ day) in November 2018, the international conference How safe is Afghanistan? in October 2019 and the digital march För en mänsklig flyktingpolitik 2020! (For a human refugee politics 2020!) that started on May 1, 2020.
The facebook group made it possible for youngsters to meet each other as well as Swedes. In a way, the group has been a school of democracy. For some, it also gave a possibility to publish poems and other texts about their feelings. Many ”unaccompanied have testified about the importance of the group.
In 2017, the first of many books, written in Swedish by “unaccompanied”, was published: Ängeln och sparven (The angel and the sparrow) by Ali Zardadi. It has been presented at many libraries in Sweden.
Ensamkommandes röster (Voices of the Unaccompanied) was a group of girls and boys travelling around the country, lecturing about the rights of women and girls and giving support to the rather few unaccompanied girls in Sweden.
In August 2017, a young girl Fatemeh Khavari gathered some of her friends to a sit strike outside the House of Parliament. They adopted the name Ung i Sverige (Young in Sweden). This grew to a two months long manifestation with hundreds of young people gathering at the stairs of Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm, supported by Swedish “helpers”. They attracted the media, and since then, every Swede knows about this group of refugees.
Ung i Sverige, as well as Ensamkommandes förbund (the Association of Unaccompanied) that was founded in 2012, have emerged as important partners for organisations and refugee projects.
Since 2016, the Raoul Wallenberg Academy has every year given the award Ungt kurage (Young courage) to at least one unaccompanied, sometimes paperless.
When the families dropped down for a sit strike on Norra Bantorget in July 2019, the support came from Ung i Sverige and Ensamkommandes förbund. The families formed the network Liv utan gränser (Life without borders).