The Kim-case: Almost all went wrong

The Swedish Migration Agency wanted the 15-year old boy Kim to be extradited to China.

Media did not take any notice, or at least did not publish the correction done by TT claiming that SPRAKAB did only insinuate that the boy Kim was from China and did not write that in their reports.

SPRAKAB shouldn’t have taken on this assignment. Several criteria should be met for a language analysis to be conducted:

1 There must be systematic differences between the dialect the speech is tried against and linguistically and geographically adjacent ones.

2 These differentiating traits must be described in the academic literature.

3 The geographical distribution of the dialect must relate in some interesting way to the residential history that the speech is supposed to corroborate.

None of these were met.

There were many errors in the case of Kim, the boy that Sweden in the end granted asylum. People who work in this industry and media companies writing about asylum cases, we can learn from our mistakes. One good thing about mistakes is that we don’t need to repeat them. 

For further questions, please contact:

Per Lunqe
Press Officer, Verified
per@lunqe.se
+46 (0) 735 106010