The Telegraph — Sweden’s government is rushing an emergency bill through parliament which will give it the power to halt road traffic across the Oresund Bridge to Denmark — bringing any future influx of asylum seekers to a sudden and dramatic halt.
The bridge, made famous by the popular television drama The Bridge, is used by 20,000 road commuters a day and has been the main entry route for those seeking asylum in Sweden. The country is expecting to receive some 190,000 asylum-seekers this year.
“This bill, if passed, would give the government the ability in an emergency to close the bridge without having to deal with it in parliament, because that would probably take too long”, Elin Tibell, press secretary to infrastructure minister Anna Johansson, told Sweden’s Dagens Industri newspaper.
Trains across the bridge will continue to run, but operators expect travel times to double from 30 minutes to an hour as police carry out passenger checks.
It comes as European ministers meeting in Brussels discussed sweeping measures to reintroduce border checks for up to two years, in an effective suspension of the thirty-year-old Schengen agreement.
The proposals are a response to the “serious deficiencies” in border control in Greece that has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the EU. It follows the move by a string of countries to reimpose border checks, currently permitted for up to six months.
Earlier in the summer, the European Commission had declared the Schengen zone “irreversible”, but it now admits the crisis has left it “comatose”.
A temporary closure of the bridge is one of a number of measures, alongside ID checks on buses, trains and passenger ferries, envisaged in the draft legislation, which will remain valid for three years.
“The number of asylum applications continues to be at a level that makes the situation … a serious threat to public order and internal security in Sweden,” the draft, which was leaked to the newspaper, reads.
“A temporary closure of the bridge can provide another measure to reduce the risk that public order or internal security is affected as a result of the large influx of asylum seekers.”
Sweden’s government late last month made a dramatic U-turn on asylum, announcing plans to tighten its border entry regime in order to bring about a “drastic reduction” in numbers.
The announcement came after the Swedish Migration Agency said that it could no longer guarantee shelter to asylum seekers entering the country, after its hunt for rooms, which has seen it send refugees everywhere from Arctic ski resorts to Wild West theme parks, reached its limits.
At Malmo’s 2013 Eurovision venue, which is being used as a temporary shelter for new arrivals, the air quality became so bad last week that the two nurses working there were pulled out for health reasons, while some refugees were begging to leave, describing it as “a prison” with “inhuman conditions”.
The conference hall where the refugees were housed had just three lavatories for more than 900 refugees, and no showers
