A Swedish protester has managed to stop the deportation of a 52-year-old man to Afghanistan by refusing to sit down as the plane prepared for take-off.

Elin Ersson took action after learning that the man on the Gothenburg to Istanbul flight would be transferred to another plane and sent to Afghanistan, where she insisted he would probably be killed.

In increasingly tense scenes, the student filmed herself as a steward and fellow passengers tried to get her to sit down and allow the flight to depart.

“There is a person getting deported to Afghanistan and the people working here are trying to take my phone,” she says in English during the 14-minute video, which has been seen almost 2 million times.

"If he is deported to Afghanistan, he probably dies.

“He will most likely get killed… I’m doing what I can do to save a person’s life.

"As long as a person is standing up the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal and I have not committed a crime."