Woman blocks deportation by standing up

Elin Ersson’s Facebook video, which is racing around the internet, is an invitation to ask ourselves, “what are we willing to stand for?”

She refused to take her seat on a flight from Gothenburg, Sweden to Turkey because a man was aboard who was being deported to Afghanistan.

“I don’t want a man’s life to be taken away just because you don’t want to miss your flight,” she says. “I am not going to sit down until the person is off the plane.”

She faced hostility from her fellow passengers.

“What is more important, a life, or your time?” she asks a passenger who tried to grab her phone.

The man was eventually taken off the plane, The Guardian says.

The protest shines a spotlight on domestic opposition to Sweden’s tough asylum regime. The government is keen to maintain expulsions of asylum seekers as the country heads towards an election in September that is being fought largely on immigration and asylum, with the far-right Sweden Democrats showing strongly in the polls.

This month an Afghan deportee was released from a flight before it left Gothenburg after he protested loudly on board.

After the Taliban rampaged through a hotel in Kabul in January, killing 22 people, and a bomb killed more than 100 people, Sweden briefly halted deportations to Afghanistan. But the Swedish Migration Board stands by its assessment that the country is safe for asylum seekers whose applications have been denied.

More than 2,000 civilians were killed in fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan in the first three months of the year, the Washington Post says.