Children’s Asylum Law Center
The Advice Bureau for Asylum Seekers and Refugees is a non-profit association that works for a legally secure asylum process. The Children’s Asylum Law Center is part of the Counseling Agency and offers free legal support in migration law issues to children, adolescents and the network around them.
The Advice Bureau for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (Advice Bureau) is an asylum law center that has been operating since 1991 for a legally secure asylum process. The Advice Bureau offers free legal advice to asylum seekers, agents, trustees, contact persons and others concerned via telephone and email. We represent asylum seekers legally in Sweden and internationally. The Advice Bureau also conducts training on asylum rights. We review legislation and its application. We are a reference body and have also designed a number of handbooks.
We are a non-profit association under the auspices of Caritas, Save the Children, the Diocese of Stockholm and the Church of Sweden. We are a Swedish partner of the UNHCR.
Since October 2016, the Advice Bureau has run the Children’s Asylum Law Center, which works specifically to safeguard children’s rights in the asylum process and ensure that children and young adults receive adequate legal advice and information about their rights.
The Children’s Asylum Law Center is a reception for children and young adults funded by the World Childhood Foundation and H.M. Queen Silvia’s Foundation CATCH. The Children’s Asylum Law Center offers telephone counselling every Thursday, personal reception for pre-booked visits and counselling by e-mail. In 2017, the Children’s Asylum Law Center answered 188 calls and 474 emails and conducted 73 personal meetings. The most common questions asked during the counselling concerned general information about the asylum process, obstacles to enforcement, family reunification, age assessment and the Upper Secondary School Act. The Children’s Asylum Law Center has also received documents for assessment and handled cases both as a public counsel and a representative.
Based on meetings with children, the Children’s Asylum Law Center’s lawyers have produced an Internal Guide for meetings with asylum-seeking children, which was the basis for an internal training for all lawyers at the Counselling Office. Training for external actors has also been carried out. In total, over 200 people have been trained. In order to increase children’s participation in the asylum process, the Advice Bureau has produced extensive informative material that contains detailed information about the asylum process from a child perspective. The informational material is available on the Advice Bureau’s website and contributes with an important complement to the information provided by the Swedish Migration Board.