HELSINKI -- Sweden's Prime Minister Goran Persson has called for a common European asylum policy and said it was unfair that some countries take in more refugees than other European Union members.

"We can't have a situation where some countries have a generous asylum policy while others go in the opposite direction," Persson told Finnish news agency STT in an interview published on Wednesday.

"If there's any area where we need a common European policy then it's this," he added.

Persson, on the last leg of a general election campaign, called on Denmark to work for a fairer refugee policy during its six-month European Union presidency, Reuters reported.

The arrest last week of a Swedish man of Tunisian origin on suspicion of trying to hijack a plane has thrown the spotlight on immigration in Sweden with elections just two weeks ago.

Persson said Sweden took in more than 100,000 refugees in connection with the Bosnia War in the 1990s.

"That was one percent of our population. I wonder if Finland took in anyone at all," he said.

Finland has one of the EU's tightest immigration policies.

Sweden opened its doors to refugees in the 1970s and only began limiting the inflow in the mid-1990s. Today, immigrants account for about one in nine of Sweden's nine million people.

Sweden will hold a general election on September 15. Opinion polls suggest a tight race between the Social Democrats (SDP) and a four-party center-right opposition alliance.

Recent controversy in the EU over illegal immigration has fueled electoral gains for far-right parties, particularly in the Netherlands and France.

No major Swedish party espouses anti-immigration views, but the SDP opposes immigration for jobs, saying jobs must first be found for over 100,000 unemployed foreigners, many of them refugees who arrived in the 1990s.

Persson poured cold water on concerns from some EU countries that expansion to the east would flood the EU with immigrants.