The European Court of Human Rights has lifted its blanket suspension on deportations to Iraq and will again treat the issue on a case-by-case basis, Sweden's migration authority said Wednesday. "The European Court of Human Rights has today (Wednesday) informed us that all cases of deportations to Iraq sent to the court will be handled individually," the Swedish Migration Board said in a statement.
On October 22, the Court had informed Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands that it would rule in favour of the plaintiffs in all cases where Iraqis appealed their deportation order until it had gathered more information on the security situation in the war-torn country.
Since then, Sweden had suspended around 200 deportations at the request of the court, the Migration Board said. "We have stopped the deportations that the court asked us to stop," the board's legal chief Mikael Ribbenvik told AFP, adding that Sweden had never completely stopped sending rejected asylum-seekers back to Iraq.