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. » | Richard Orange, Copenhagen | Thursday, December 3, 2015
