Comment by impossiblefork
1 year ago
There aren't five cases in the Swedish court system where this has been relevant.
There's only really been two cases. One is a case where a Swedish Christian Democrat politician brought up what the opposing council in a certain dispute had done previously and was convicted of defamation for this. Another is a case where a Swedish journalist was convicted of defamation for that he brought up that a guy who was suing people for all sorts of rubbish was himself criminal-adjacent in that he had been prosecuted for animal cruelty, but had remained outside the country until the state of limitations came into effect.
I know nothing of Swedish law, but do these rulings not conflict with Section 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights?
Probably, but the court that I think would be most likely to rule against it is the ECHR (i.e. the EC court).
I believe that the government would have lost if this had been brought to the ECHR.
The EU charter of fundamental rights does not apply to national law
And the echr gives a lot of leeway to national laws
ECHR is law in Sweden and the constitution states that no law can be enforced that is contrary to the ECHR. This has consequences for when defamation is punishable.
Edit: And the EU charter is basically the ECHR but with some minor additions and it's own court.
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OK, so it's not actually a big problem. I can't identify the first case, the second sounds like Lamotte, and if so, it's not a journalist but a YouTube beggar catering to a neofascist audience.
To me it's obvious that you either ignore or is unaware of constitutional limitations of the criminalisation of defamation, notably in ECHR and three constitutional laws. If you spread defamatory 'truths' in a free speech setting where the victim can defend themselves you'll easily get away with it.
A law can have chilling consequences even if it is not often prosecuted.
The New York Times had an article a few years ago about Swedish defamation law in the context of the #MeToo movement, so there’s another example for you.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/15/opinion/cissi...
Has the truth of Wallin's claims actually been established? IIRC that hasn't been done, and if so that case is irrelevant.
And it's not an article, it's an opinion piece by a person who also claims to have been mistreated by Virtanen and helped spread Wallin's statements about him: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/granskning/ug/reportern-skrev-att...
Edit: Should probably add that there is very little chilling from our defamation criminalisation, it's commonly used in far right political activism for example. The Lamotte case is an outlier where I think the victim didn't engage the cops and ran his own civil case against him instead.
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Lamotte is a very pure example of a journalist. The fact that he, during the later part of his career has been funded by small donations from the general public is only in his favour. That he worked for a large mass of people is something positive.
The ECHR is great and I believe that both these cases, if the people convicted had sued Sweden in the ECHR, then Sweden would have lost.
However, Swedish law is still Swedish law. Parliament is sovereign and can what it likes, legal as illegal. It'd be great to have an ECHR judgement against Sweden in one of these cases, it would have given weight to the need to change these laws into something with respect for truth, giving us a chance to throw away the tradition of the courts to regard reputation as something belonging to a person, when reputation is other people's beliefs. There should only be protection against reputational harm from falsehoods.
No, he is not. I don't think he's even had "utgivningsbevis" at any point in his career as YouTube beggar. Maybe he got one after he lost the defamation cases, I'm not sure. During this particular criminal venture he didn't even try to protect himself with the formalities around and practices in journalism, so it mostly shows your political sympathies when you claim he was one.
ECHR is applied in swedish courts, it's swedish law and constitutionally limits every other regular law.