by Erna Bodström
Asylum has traditionally been thought of as a form of long-term protection, but in recent years especially in Northern Europe and also Finland have experienced a so-called temporary turn. This means that there has been a tendency to use migration politics to make international protection more temporary in nature. This essentially changes the way the temporality of asylum has been understood and, in practise, it makes it more difficult and insecure for those with a right to international protection to build their new lives.
There are two reasons why asylum has been thought of as a form of long-term protection. First, the criteria for granting asylum in Europe are quite strict: asylum requires personal persecution for reasons such as ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, or political opinion – all matters that are a deep part of a person’s identity and that do not generally change overnight. Therefore, the persecution based on those conditions can be expected to be long-term, even lasting for the rest of the person’s life, unless their home country goes through significant and stable political changes for the better. Second, long-term protection has been a way to encourage integration, for example by encouraging language learning and employment. When a person must start their whole life anew, this requires time, stability and safety.
The temporality turn has been especially visible in Northern Europe and also in Finland (Brekke et al., 2020; Schultz, 2020; Bodström, accepted). There have been two kinds of efforts to make asylum more temporary. Asylum seekers have simply been granted fewer long term forms of protection, as Denmark did in the last decade with many Syrians by granting them temporary protection instead asylum. Since then, the EU countries have granted temporary protection for those fleeing the war in Ukraine. Originally, temporary protection could only be granted for a maximum of three years, but as the war has continued, the temporary protection has in practise also become more long term. This also points out the problematic nature of the temporary turn of asylum: the timeline of international conflict or political changes can be difficult to predict.
Additionally, there have been efforts to make asylum more temporary by shortening the length of residence permits granted based on refuge and by reassessing the continued need for asylum more often. This has been the road chosen by Finland, and it speaks volumes to changing orientations to protection in Finnish asylum politics.
The temporary turn in Finnish asylum politics
In January 2025, Finland adopted a change to the Aliens Act, in which the length of residence permits granted to those entitled to international protection was shortened to the minimum allowed by EU regulations. While the length of the permits used to be four years, they are now, after the amendment, three years for those who have been granted asylum and one or two years for those granted subsidiary protection. In addition, the Finnish Immigration Service (responsible for both international protection and residence permits in Finland) was obligated to automatically investigate whether international protection is still needed every time a person renews their residence permit. Previously this has only been investigated when the Immigration Service assessed there to be a valid reason to suspect that international protection might no longer be needed. This is a significant change when it comes to the temporality of asylum, as it increases long-term uncertainty for those granted international protection (Bodström & Lyytinen, 2024).
The automatic reassessment had originally also been part of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum of the EU, but it was, in the end, excluded from the pact, as it was seen as inefficient. Still, Finland has ratified the reassessment as part of its asylum politics, and even in a stricter form than originally proposed in the EU pact. While the pact suggested assessing the continued need of international protection once or twice, the version adopted by the Aliens Act of Finland does not include such restriction; rather, the reassessment is apparently to be continued as long as the refugee is to renew their residence permit, meaning every one to three years, possibly to the end of the person’s life.
Removal of international protection in Finland
A central idea of the temporary turn of asylum is to enforce the temporality of refugeehood. Still, there is little research on how or even whether refugeehood truly ends. This is what I have studied in the Endings – Refuge, Time, and Space project by analysing the decisions of the Finnish Immigration Service about the removal of international protection status.
By international protection I refer to both asylum and subsidiary protection. Subsidiary protection is granted to people who do not meet all the criteria for granting asylum but who nevertheless cannot return to their home country without facing a serious risk of inhuman treatment. In order to remove the international protection status, the authorities have to show that the person is no longer in danger in their home country or that they have indeed never been in danger and, for this reason, international protection should not have even been granted in the first place. In the Finnish law these practices are referred to as cessation and revocation, respectively, and in this text I refer to them together as ‘removal’.
In the years 2015–2022 the Finnish Immigration Service made altogether 5600 decisions on the removal of international protection, of which approximately 2000 ended with removal; the others did not. (Information request from the Finnish Immigration Service, 2023 March). These investigations of removal had been conducted before the Amendment of the Aliens Act of Finland in 2025 came into force, meaning that all the investigations were started because the Immigration Service assessed that there was a reason to suspect that the grounds for the removal would be met. Still, in the end, two thirds of the cases determined that there were no grounds to remove the international protection status.
Based on my analysis, however, this is not due to a lack of effort by the Immigration Service – it is because there simply were no legal grounds for removing international protection. This implies that the removal investigations in themselves are quite inefficient – and that they were inefficient already before the law amendment that made them systematic. Indeed, the law amendment is likely to make the investigations even more inefficient, as they no longer even require a reason to suspect. This inefficiency – which challenges the temporary turn of asylum – suggests that the need for international protection indeed often tends to be long term.
Temporality in the removal of international protection
When authorities begin to examine the removal of asylum, the investigations take – based on my data – months or, in many cases, even years. During the investigation, the people whom it concerns end up in limbo. Receiving the information about the investigation interrupts their normal life, they are likely to experience anxiety and fear, and it is difficult for them to continue the routines of their everyday life or to plan for the future (e.g. Brekke et al., 2021). This affects the people and their loved ones throughout the investigation period – that is, months or even years – regardless of whether their international protection status is removed in the end (ibid.).
The investigation can start at any point of the person’s life. This means that the investigations can affect the lives of refugees years or even decades after they have settled in their new home country. In my data, the person who had resided in Finland the longest before their asylum was removed had been living in the country for 37 years. Because they had a permanent residence permit in Finland, they were not given a deportation decision, meaning that they were able to continue their life in Finland. Another person who had resided in Finland for 33 years was ordered to leave the country. They had, about ten years before the deportation decision, been convicted of serious crimes, but after that they had lived a law-abiding life in Finland. Both of these people had arrived to Finland when they were young, under 30 years of age, and they had both lived in Finland for most of their lives.
As the new amendments of the Aliens Act of Finland, related to the temporary turn, increase the investigations of the removal of international protection, it is also likely to add to the insecurity and uncertainty of refugees about their future lives in Finland. This is further impacted by the amendments to the Aliens Act and the Citizenship Act, which make getting a permanent residence permit and citizenship more difficult and lengthier. In practise, this means that a person entitled to international protection in Finland will be subjected to repeated investigations of removal and will have to live with uncertainty for longer than before – possibly for the rest of their lives. In the long term, this is likely to increase the number of people to be deported after having lived law-abiding lives in Finland even for decades.
References:
Bodström, E. (accepted). The removal of international protection as a process of administrative rebordering. International Journal of Refugee Law. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeaf045
Bodström, E. & Lyytinen, E. (2024, June 17). Turvapaikkapolitiikan uusi suunta: Epävarmuuden paradigma [The new direction in the Finnish asylum politics: the paradigm of uncertainty]. Politiikasta. https://politiikasta.fi/turvapaikkapolitiikan-uusi-suunta-epavarmuuden-paradigma/
Brekke, J.-P., Vedsted-Hansen, J. & Thorburn Stern, R. (2020). Temporary Asylum and Cessation of Refugee Status in Scandinavia: Policies, Practices and Dilemmas. European Migration Network EMN. https://www.udi.no/globalassets/global/european-migration-network_i/emn-norway-papers/emn-occasional-paper-temporary-asylum-and-cessation-of-refugee-status-in-scandinavia-2020.pdf
Brekke, J.-P., Birkvad, S.R., & Erdal, M. B. (2021). Losing the Right to Stay: Revocation of Refugee Permits in Norway. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(2), 1637–56. https://doi:10.1093/jrs/feaa006.
Schultz, J. (2020). Temporary Protection and the Erosion of Refugee Status. In C. M. Jacobsen, M.-A. Karlsen & S. Khoshravi (Eds.), Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration (pp. 170–185). Routledge.
***
Erna Bodström (D.Soc.Sc.) works as a Research Fellow at the Migration Institute of Finland, in the Endings – Refuge, Time, and Space project (funded by Kone Foundation, 2023–26) that studies how refugeehood ends – or whether it indeed does. Her research and expertise are related to asylum system, asylum assessment and asylum politics. The text is based on a presentation given by the author at the Symposium on Precarities and Temporalities in Migratory Contexts, organised at the University of Helsinki on 26-27 August 2025.
