AA, a national of Iraq, was granted refugee status in Sweden in July 2017. In September 2020, he was sentenced to 2 years and 6 months in prison for assault, aggravated unlawful threats, petty drug offenses, and serious weapons offenses. After the sentence remained final, the Swedish Migration Agency decided in January 2024 to revoke AA's refugee status because the serious weapons offense he was convicted of constituted a particularly serious crime. 

AA appealed the decision to the Migration Court in Gothenburg, which rejected the appeal insofar as it concerned the refugee status.

AA appealed the Migration Court's judgment, arguing that the serious weapons offences for which he was convicted was not a particularly serious offence within the meaning of the Aliens Act, as no ammunition was found in connection with the weapon and he did not pose a serious danger to public order and security in Sweden.

The Migration Agency considered that the appeal should be rejected as weapons offences were by their nature crimes that constituted a serious danger to fundamental interests of society and also added that the fact that ammunition for the shotgun was not in the home did not in itself exclude that the weapon could be used for criminal purposes.

The Migration Court of Appeal rejected the appeal. The court noted that the possibility of revoking a refugee status must be applied restrictively and that when assessing whether the crime is a particularly serious crime as referred to in Chapter 4, Section 3 of the Aliens Act, an individual assessment must be made where, in addition to the nature of the crime, consideration must also be given to, among others, the circumstances attributable to the specific act. The court further referred to the CJEU judgment in Staatssecretaris van Justitie en Veiligheid v M.A. (C‑402/22, 6 July 2023) in which it was held that there must be at least one final judgment concerning an individual offence that is to be regarded as particularly serious, an offence of exceptionally high seriousness and which seriously undermines the legal order of the society concerned. When assessing this seriousness, account must be taken, inter alia, of both the prescribed and the imposed penalty, the nature of the offence, any aggravating or mitigating circumstances, whether there was intent, the nature and extent of the damage caused by the offence, as well as the procedure applied to prosecute the offence. The CJEU judgment also highlighted that the third country national must be considered to pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society and a proportionality assessment must then be made, whereby the danger to society posed by the person must be weighed against the consequences of his or her no longer enjoying the rights conferred by reason of his or her refugee status.

The Migration Court of Appeal made an overall assessment and considered that the aggravated weapons offense committed by the applicant constituted a particularly serious crime. The court noted that the crime of weapons offenses is divided into four degrees of severity – minor, normal, serious and extremely serious. When AA committed the serious weapons offense, the minimum penalty for a minor weapons offense was a fine and the maximum penalty for an extremely serious weapons offense was 6 years’ imprisonment. Considering that the basic rule in Swedish courts was that sentencing is based on the lower part of the penalty scale and that the upper part of the penalty scale is rarely used, the Migration Court of Appeal considered that the sentence received by AA was such a particularly severe penalty that it could be considered that the crime was particularly serious. 

In addition, the court noted that a serious weapon offence is a crime that is a threat to a fundamental public interest in that it constitutes the prerequisite for a long series of other violent crimes. On this basis alone, the court noted that AA constituted a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to a fundamental public interest.

Lastly, regarding the proportionality of the revocation of refugee status, the court considered that when a foreigner is deemed to have committed a particularly serious crime and is further considered to constitute a threat to a fundamental public interest, there must be special and qualifying circumstances for a revocation not to be considered proportionate.

The court therefore concluded that the revocation of AA's refugee status was proportionate.