21 August 2023
A Plea for Proportionality
In recent months the burning of the Koran in Sweden has caused headlines and severe anger in many parts of the Muslim world as well as bewilderment across the EU as to why Sweden continues to permit the practice. The Government is currently looking into how the law can be changed to include a ban on the burning of the Koran in the Public Order Act. In this blog post, I explain why it might be wise to do so and how this might be done. Continue reading >>
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23 February 2023
Departing from Hostile Refugee Landscapes
In December 2022, the Swedish Migration Agency estimated that the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan has made the lives of Afghan women and girls so difficult that it counts as persecution based on gender. Against this background, the Migration Agency announced that all women and girls from Afghanistan are eligible to refugee status and a three-year residence permit in Sweden. These policies represent a major departure from the wide range of restrictive amendments that Denmark and Sweden, over the past decades, have introduced to their asylum laws with the aim of becoming less attractive target countries for asylum seekers. Continue reading >>
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01 November 2022
The Swedish Change of Government
With the current turbulences of British politics, Sweden may come across as a quiet Nordic country where not much is happening. Surprisingly little has been written about the Swedish elections from a legal perspective. On September 11, 2022, Swedes voted for a center-rightwing coalition with support from the far right. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss whether the Swedish election is as dangerous as it has been portrayed or if it (simultaneously) represents a mainstreaming of Swedish laws with some of the EU legal framework and is perhaps likely to activate Swedish courts to refer to EU courts more often. Continue reading >>
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16 May 2022
A Swedish NATO Membership and Its Constitutional Barriers
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the debate about a possible NATO membership in Sweden has been intense. The ruling Social Democratic Party was against a membership for a long time, but on Sunday 15 May it changed its position. Now everything points to a Swedish NATO accession and it seems likely that the constitutional barriers for that are surprisingly low: parliamentary approval with a simple majority vote. Continue reading >>
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15 December 2021
The ‘Ketchup Effect’
A closer look at the use of surveillance measures by public authorities in Sweden following 9/11 reveals that once it began, the development can perhaps best be described as displaying a ‘ketchup effect’; where you open the bottle and at first nothing comes out, and then it all comes out at once and you have effectively ruined your dish (which, depending on your view of ketchup, may have been doomed from the moment you picked up the bottle). Continue reading >>
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01 June 2021
Big Brother’s Little, More Dangerous Brother
On 25 May 2021, the European Court of Human Rights issued judgments in two connected cases: Big Brother Watch v. UK and Centrum för Rättvisa v. Sweden. Both cases involved the review of bulk interception of communications, described by its critics as “mass surveillance”. The Swedish example has attracted less criticism from the ECtHR than the UK, and can be construed as a model law. However, the Swedish legislation is highly opaque and the ECtHR's scrutiny has fallen short. Continue reading >>
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24 February 2021
COVID-19 in Sweden: A Soft Power Approach
The Swedish political and legal response to the Covid-19 pandemic is best described as soft in terms of the character of the measures applied, and decentralized in terms of the division of powers and responsibilities. Swedish constitutional law does not provide for a state of emergency in a peace time crisis, such as a pandemic. Instead, the principle of statutory anticipation is used, which means that ordinary laws (with, in some cases, special provisions which can be activated) apply also in a time of crisis, e.g. the Public Order Act (POA), which allows the government to restrict the number of participants in public meetings or organized public events. Where these powers are deemed to be insufficient, the legislative procedure should be sufficiently flexible to allow new powers to be added relatively speedily. However, the events in 2020 showed that this approach suffers from several deficiencies. Continue reading >>
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