Are Christian Converts the New ‘People’? Migration Courts’ objectivity and the role of the popularly elected lay judges in a judicialized asylum system in Sweden.

In October 2020, MP Björn Söder of the radical right populist Sweden Democrats (SD) who was also the Secretary-General of the SD between 2005-2015 has submitted a written question[1] to Minister of Foreign Affairs Anne Linde asking if she would intend to raise the issue of Iran’s unacceptable treatment of Christian converts in her upcoming meeting with the Iranian Government. Sweden Democrats, in 2019, together with the Left Party (V), was one of the two parties supported Christian Democrat’s (KD) initiative in the Swedish Parliament to prompt the investigation of the handling of Christian converts’ cases by Migration Board to see if it is legally secure and equivalent across the country. While SD allegedly supports converts’ entitlement to the fair asylum process in public debate, in Migration Court where immigrants whose application for asylum has been rejected by the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) are able to have their decision reconsidered, the laymen (nämndemän) of SD reject 93%[2] of all asylum appeals of the Christian converts. Laymen (lay judges) who are elected by the County Councils are affiliated with the political parties and appointed to the Migration Court in proportion to political party representation in the last local elections supposed to represent the common sense of the people and their democratic participation to decision making process. In this paper I aim to reflect on if conversion which is central to the disconnection of religion and culture (Roy, 2010)[3] is instrumentalized by Sweden Democrats through re-inscribing ‘belonging’ with new religious/cultural content and pitting the ‘good migrants’ (converts) against the ‘bad’ ones. [1] https://data.riksdagen.se/fil/1EDFB4CD-5FDF-4CDD-B0AB-C6FB5931F8F2 [2] https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/kaAkPX/rapport-rattsosaker-provning-av-konvertiter [3] ROY, Olivier. (2010) Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways, New York, Columbia University Press,