Sweden's law of silence
Andrew Brown
Gothenburg 'Fascism with a human face' is how an American lawyer described Sweden after spending two years in this country. While this is unwarranted — who are the fascists, and where is the human face? — there is considerable evidence that the rule of the law has broken down wherever the interests of the citizen conflict with those of the elected government, and been replaced by the arbitrary rule of the bureaucracy. The most prominent and celebrated example of this process is the 'Exceptional Law', which provides that no private citizen may sue a senior government employee for crimes committed in the course of duty. This law was passed unanimously (and, I am prepared to bet, unread) by the Riksdag in 1974. It was then described as an -editorial alteration' contained in two paragraphs of a bill 127 pages long called 'Alterations in the Electoral Law etc'. It is still in force, and though it is to be repealed in some uncertain future, no one knows whether the arrangements that will replace it will constitute more than acosmetic improvement.
The law was clearly a rush job. Not only does it protect the obvious people — professors, judges, senior prosecutors and army officers, as well as the upper ranks of the civil service — but also such luminaries as the director of the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm, the chief of the army's dogtraining school, and the chief librarian of the University of Agriculture in Uppsala. When passed, it covered around 5,000 people. This number now seems to have grown to around 7,000. Should any of these people slander, embezzle, rape, or murder while on duty, the victims (or their surviving relatives) have no means of forcing the public prosecutor to take action, and cannot themselves apply to the courts for justice.
The law only came to light as a result of an unusually savage academic intrigue in Lund. A lecturer in chemistry was dislodged from his post after a libellous political accusation was unofficially attached to his dossier. He successfully sued one of the people responsible for this intrigue, but was prevented by the Exceptional Law from bringing a prosecution against the more senior among his enemies, who had committed or connived at exactly the same crime, but whom the public prosecutor refused to proceed against. It may seem extraordinary that a man can thus be prevented from teaching chemistry under a social democratic government because one of the German universities that gave him a reference was vaguely supposed to be a hotbed of Marxism (on the strength of a letter to the editor published in a Swedish provincial paper), but social democracy is a many-splendoured thing.
Reinhard Helmers, the lecturer in Lund, is a German immigrant, but, unlike most of the Swedes involved, he was not prepared to behave like a 'good German'. In 1978 he sent a draft bill providing for the abolition of the Exceptional Law to representatives of all the political parties in the Riksdag. Only the communists and one People's Party representative were prepared to consider the problem even when all the hard work had been done for them. It is not from such people that one expects a reasoned and principled defence of freedom, and this is perhaps the most charitable explanation of the fact that the Riksdag rejected the first attempt to repeal the law by 269 votes to 17. But this most charitable explanation squares badly with the way in which the law was defended. The chairman of the standing committee on justice said, 'It is really damaging that the debate is conducted in such tones that . . . administrative decisions that are difficult to understand, and possibly less than successful,. . • appear as the results of corruption and conspiracy . . . when in fact [the people responsible] are highly deserving men and women, who have shown by years of public service that they have the qualities necessary for the jobs of ombudsmen or prosecutors'.
It is not immediately clear why these paragons should need special protection from the law if they are so much less likely to commit crimes than are the rest of us, but perhaps Herr Lidgard was trying to explain this point when he went on to say, 'We speak of rehabilitation. Does that mean that the wrong done to the plaintiff is righted if he manages to have his opponent convicted of a crime he has committed, and perhaps fined, or even sent to prison? No, of course not. It is not revenge the plaintiff shall have.' He went on to deprecate the 'rather reactionary view' of justice held by the opponents of the Exceptional Law. This debate went unnoticed in the Swedish press. Nothing in the experience or training of the reporters who cover the Riksdag had prepared them for the idea that genuine questions of political principle would ever be debated there. But even if idleness and incompetence, rather than self-censorship, were responsible for the silence of the Swedish press, the establishment here made vigorous attempts to kill the story. The stringer who had been responsible for the articles on the law which had appeared in Finland was abruptly dropped by Helsingin Sanomat, apparently as the result of pressure exerted by the Swedish embassy in Helsinki — something which is the subject of a pending court case in Finland. And when the law was finally discussed on Swedish television, such extraordinary efforts were made to censure the freelance responsible that his case has now been taken up by the Index .on Censorship. Only when German, Swiss, and Italian papers picked up the story did it return to Sweden, and even then the Italian embassy here rebuked the Stockholm correspondent of Corriere della Sera for being so tasteless as to point out that the only 20th century precedent for the Exceptional Law was a measure of Mussolini's.
There's no doubt that foreign interest ill the Exceptional Law was vital to the success of the campaign against it. This interest became most embarrassing for the Swedish government when the Swedish candidate for the post of Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, who was regarded as certain to get the job, failed to be elected after a Swiss radio station broadcast a long programme on the law the day before the election, and received at least 20 phone calls from interested listeners in Strasbourg. The law itself has been referred to the European Commission on Human Rights for its decision.
The Swedish defence there is likely to be that a special committee has reported in sOme haste that the law should be abolished, and replaced by a system of simplified court hearings, which will ensure that all government employees are equally pro tected from the prying public. But this defence seems otiose. Hans Danelius, the head of the Foreign Ministry's legal department, has gone on record as saying that international agreements such as the Helsinki Convention, the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on Human Rights, even when signed by the Swedish government, are not, and should not be, binding on Swedish courts. They are only binding 'on an international plane'. Perhaps Ambassador Danelius feels that if he were to produce this argument in Strasbourg, some people might be tempted to ask what right the Swedish government has to upbraid the Russians or the Argentines for taking exactly this view of 'Human Rights' conventions.
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