The first four Swedish prisoners have arrived at Tartu Prison in Estonia, marking the start of a rental agreement that lets Sweden serve out sentences abroad.
The inmates arrived on Tuesday afternoon at the prison in Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city, DR reports. They had landed hours earlier at the Ämari air base southwest of Tallinn, after an hour-long flight from Linköping in Sweden.
They were driven to the prison under armed escort. Estonia’s justice minister, Liisa Pakosta, said all four are men with Swedish citizenship and declined to give further details to the Estonian public broadcaster ERR. Swedish justice minister Gunnar Strömmer described the first transport as historic in comments to SVT.
Sweden signed the agreement with Estonia in June to rent cell space across the Baltic Sea. Swedish prisons are close to capacity after years of tougher sentencing policy, while Estonia has seen its inmate numbers fall. Swedish police counted 17,500 active gang criminals in 2025, along with 50,000 people connected to them in some way.
According to SVT, Swedish taxpayers will pay just under 230 million kroner a year for an initial 300 places. The agreement allows up to 600 inmates, with each additional prisoner costing close to 64,000 kroner a month. ERR reports that the arrivals will come in stages, with up to 100 inmates in Tartu by the end of September 2026 and up to 200 by the end of the year.
Special conditions and selection criteria
The Estonian prison service runs the facility and handles daily operations, and Estonian law applies as a starting point even though the sentences were handed down in Sweden. A number of exceptions were written into the agreement for the Swedish inmates, including roller blinds and televisions with Swedish channels in the cells. SVT reports that they are also exempt from Estonia’s zero tolerance rules on nicotine and may buy products such as nicotine pouches.
The Swedish Ministry of Justice requires that transferred inmates be men over 18, convicted of offenses such as murder, sexual crimes or economic crime. They may not need hospital treatment outside the prison, and they may not have links to gangs or criminal networks or be radicalized. Estonian authorities give final approval for each name, and the Swedish newspaper Expressen reports that they rejected 20 of the first 37 prisoners proposed.
The transfers follow the entry into force of Swedish legislation on July 1, 2026, after press releases from the Government Offices of Sweden in June 2025 set summer 2026 as the target. The deal remains contested in Estonia. A poll published by ERR this summer found 54 percent of respondents opposed and 35 percent in favor, and Pakosta stresses that all inmates will return to Sweden.
