JO and Riksrevisionen on Sweden's citizenship backlog: what the watchdogs actually found

Why this matters now

Sweden's citizenship backlog has been the subject of years of public debate. With the 6 June 2026 cutoff behind us and the queue still over 100,000, applicants increasingly ask whether the agency can be forced to decide faster. Two formal oversight reports answer that question — and the answer is more limited than headlines suggest.

This article summarises what JO and Riksrevisionen actually said, in their own words, and what changed afterwards. For a deeper dive into the underlying queue itself, see Sweden's citizenship backlog. For how the request to conclude mechanism works in practice, see court-ordered citizenship cases.

Riksrevisionen RiR 2025:5 — the National Audit Office report

On 25 March 2025, Riksrevisionen — Sweden's independent National Audit Office, reporting directly to the Riksdag — published its report Migrationsverkets hantering av medborgarskapsärenden, registered as RiR 2025:5. Its overall conclusion is that Migrationsverket's handling of citizenship cases is not effective.

Key findings reported by Riksrevisionen, in summary:

• Median queue time: approximately 290 days.
• Queue share: queue time alone accounted for about 82 per cent of total processing time in median cases.
• Open cases as of 31 December 2023: approximately 96,000.
• Long-waiters: roughly 27,000 cases had been waiting more than two years.
• Decision quality: deficiencies in management and organisation were flagged as a risk to correct outcomes.
• Equal treatment: the handling of requests to conclude was found to create negative consequences for individuals and to undermine equal treatment.

Riksrevisionen made recommendations to both the Government and Migrationsverket. The Government formally responded in a written communication to the Riksdag.

JO decision 9043-2024 — the Parliamentary Ombudsman ruling

On 24 September 2025, the Parliamentary Ombudsman (Justitieombudsmannen, JO) issued decision 9043-2024 in a new review of how Migrationsverket handles dröjsmålstalan — formally, requests to conclude under Section 12 of the Administrative Procedure Act (förvaltningslagen 2017:900) — in citizenship cases.

The decision has two parts.

1. The system itself: accepted, with reservations

JO had previously criticised Migrationsverket for using an automated process that systematically rejected requests to conclude without individual reasoning. After that earlier criticism, the agency built a revised procedure: cases resolvable within roughly four weeks, and those deemed substantially delayed, now receive manual review. JO found this revised system acceptable as meeting the minimum scrutiny requirement — but did not endorse it as best practice.

2. Failure to communicate with the representative: unacceptable

In the specific case before JO, Migrationsverket sent its rejection of the request to conclude only to the applicant's registered address — not to the applicant's legal representative (ombud), whose contact details were on file. JO called that failure "oacceptabelt" (unacceptable) and stated that the agency must ensure documents are communicated to representatives when required.

This is a procedural point with real consequences: if a rejection is not properly served on the representative, deadlines to appeal may be affected, and the applicant's legal protection is weakened.

What actually changed

The two rulings produced limited but real change:

• Migrationsverket replaced the fully automated rejection model with a manual review track for short-decidable and substantially delayed cases.
• The agency was put on formal notice — by an independent constitutional body — that service on legal representatives is mandatory, not optional.
• In its January 2026 communication, Migrationsverket cited oversight feedback as one reason for prioritising older cases in 2025, which contributed to fewer (but more thorough) decisions overall. (We summarise the resulting 2025 numbers separately.)

What did not change:

• There is still no general right to have a citizenship case prioritised for convenience.
• A request to conclude under §12 still only gives you the right to a decision or a formal rejection within four weeks — not the right to be granted citizenship faster.
• Since late 2025, Migrationsverket has processed citizenship cases in oldest-first order. The §12 mechanism no longer reliably accelerates a case, and reporting indicates these requests can themselves take longer to handle than before.

What this means for you as an applicant

The watchdog reports are useful background, not a personal remedy. The practical takeaways:

• If you have a legal representative, make sure their contact details are correctly registered with Migrationsverket. The JO ruling exists precisely because this is where things slip.
• If more than six months have passed since you filed your citizenship application, you may file a one-time written request to conclude. The agency must then either decide the case or formally reject the request within four weeks. A rejection can be appealed to a migration court.
• Do not treat the request to conclude as a shortcut. Riksrevisionen and JO both note that the mechanism has serious limits, and the agency's oldest-first processing means these requests no longer reliably accelerate a case.
• Keep your file complete. Many delays in the queue are caused by missing documents or unverified identity. See our guides on identity verification and the in-person ID check.

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