Comment by cess11
1 year ago
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.
> Has the truth of Wallin's claims actually been established? IIRC that hasn't been done, and if so that case is irrelevant.
No, it's absolutely not irrelevant. The court refused to consider whether Wallin's claims were true because it held that they would be criminally defamatory even if true.
> In this case, despite Mr. Virtanen’s being one of the highest-profile writers at the country’s largest newspaper, the court concluded that he was not enough of a public figure to justify public interest in his personal conduct. Ms. Wallin’s posts, in other words, were not justifiable, and as a result, it didn’t matter whether her account of their encounter was accurate. “The court will not review whether the statements were true,” the verdict read.
In a country where truth is a defense against defamation charges, like the US, the court would have had to have considered whether Wallin's claims were true. Because Sweden does not consider truth a defense Wallin didn't even have the opportunity to present a case for truth.
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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.