The case concerned the interpretation of national legislative provisions on eligibility for a permanent residence after having been granted refugee status in a third subsequent application.

The applicant applied for asylum for the first time on 15 March 2013, but his application was rejected. Based on a third application submitted on 18 December 2020, he was granted refugee status and a continuous residence permit for the period from 28 December 2021 to 28 December 2025. The applicant has refugee status in Finland and applied for a permanent residence permit on 1st April 2022. The Finnish immigration Service rejected the application, and the administrative court confirmed the FIS decision. In the onward appeal before the Supreme Administrative Court, the applicant argued that according to Section 56 of the Aliens Act, the four-year period of residence of a person who has been granted a residence permit on the basis of international protection is counted from the date of submission of the last application for international protection or from the date of entry. The legal issue at stake was whether the four-year residence period referred to in Section 56(1) of the Aliens Act, which is a prerequisite for a permanent residence permit, must be counted from the date of entry of the refugee, even if the residence permit obtained on the basis of refugee status was granted only on the basis of a third application.

The Supreme Administrative Court noted that:

• According to Section 56 (3), the four-year period is calculated from the date of entry if the alien had a residence permit for continuous residence in the country at the time of arrival. If a residence permit has been applied for in Finland, the four-year period is calculated from the start date of the fixed-term residence permit granted for the first continuous residence in Finland.
• According to Section 56 (4), if a residence permit has been obtained on the basis of refugee status or subsidiary protection, the four-year period is calculated from the date of entry.

The majority of the Supreme Administrative Court considered that Section 56 (4) of the Aliens Act places beneficiaries of international protection in a different position from other foreigners with regard to the conditions for a permanent residence permit and that persons applying for international protection are in a different position under aliens' law than persons applying for a residence permit on other grounds. As such, the court concluded that the four-year period required for a permanent residence permit is calculated from the date of entry if the applicant's residence permit was obtained on the basis of refugee status, i.e. asylum. The court stated that the rule cannot be applied in such a way that the time limit starts only from the time when the application for asylum is lodged or from the time when a positive asylum decision has been taken. Based on the abovementioned, the Supreme Administrative Court annulled the contested decisions and referred the case back for re-examination.

In a dissenting opinion, two judges referred to the preparatory work for the Aliens Act, and stated that it did not consider explicitly a situation where a person has applied for international protection for the second time after receiving a negative decision. However, the scheme of the section 56 does not support an interpretation in which paragraph 4 would be interpreted as a separate provision without taking into account the entirety of the section and the connection between the grounds for entry and the starting point of the calculation of the time limit in its various parts. Therefore, the dissenting judges stated that, the wording of Section 56 (4) of the Aliens Act cannot be interpreted as meaning that the time limit is calculated from the original date of entry, even if there was no need for international protection in the first application but international protection was subsequently granted on the basis of a new application submitted later.

The dissenting judges stated that, when an applicant has not been granted international protection on the basis of an asylum application submitted after his entry in 2013, there are no grounds for considering that the four-year period laid down in Section 56 of the Aliens Act should be calculated from the date of entry, even though he or she has been granted refugee status on the basis of a third asylum application made years later.