The new citizenship requirements that the government wants to introduce include "living honorably", knowing Swedish and being able to support yourself. You must also have resided in Sweden for a longer period of time, as a general rule eight years instead of the current five.
When the law is scheduled to come into force - on National Day, June 6 - it will apply to all cases that have not yet been decided at that time, according to the government.
Thousands of cases
In January, there were almost 100,000 open citizenship cases, according to statistics from the Swedish Migration Board. In 2025, the processing time was an average of 573 days.
Senior lawyers in the Legislative Council find it "somewhat questionable" that the government has not proposed any transitional rules in the council's referral. The Migration Board's processing and decision times for people who want to become Swedish citizens "are already too long".
The lawyers point out that this means that individuals who applied for citizenship under the old rules may be assessed according to the new, significantly stricter requirements for becoming a citizen, and not the rules that applied when they applied.
Advises against introduction
The need for transitional rules concerns the individual's "confidence in the robustness of the legal order," the Legislative Council writes and continues:
"And to the applicant's legitimate expectation that the regulation that was the basis for the application or for an appeal is not undermined by the regulation being significantly changed to the applicant's detriment during the processing period."
The Legislative Council advises against "introducing the proposed regulation without transitional provisions".
