Tag: brott och straff

24 Nov. – SD’s land days of plenty

SD’s Jimmie Åkesson revels in his popularity
pic: SVT.se

The Sweden Democrats are in the middle of their “Land days” (landsdagar) congress in Örebro and the changes in their platform have been several. A change of heart? A maturing social and political awareness? Or a paint job to look a little more up to date?

The official SD political platform will likely include the following changes:

  • ok for homosexual couples to adopt kids: “all children have the right to have a mother- and father figure in their lives” they write
  • will go along with the current, legal 18-week limit for question-free abortions (not their previous platform of a 12 week limit)
  • no upper age limit for free mammograms or cervical cancer screenings (SvD.se/congress).

As Ewa Stenberg at DN writes, SD’s core ideology is still intact, though: people who come to Sweden must adjust to Sweden, or leave; the number of people emigrating to Sweden must decrease – in fact, more should leave than stay; SD will see a minimum of language differences, cultural differences and religious differences; public service radio and television should act to increase social cohesion, and; previously convicted, repeat offenders can just be tossed into jail again without trial – if they’re really, really hopeless cases.

Moreover, the party held that: asylum seekers should only come to Sweden first via the United Nations’ quota system, and that preference should be given to women, children and persecuted minorities such as HBT-persons and Christians; the requirements for citizenship should be raised and more clearly be coupled with high degrees of societal integration; citizenship can be recalled if the person lied on their application or if they joined a terrorist organization; police training can be paid in some cases; legal parameters for crime fighting should be widened and that it should be made illegal to join a criminal organization.

SD’s group leader (soon to be ex-group leader) Mattias Karlsson raved that only SD could save the country. “The situation for Sweden is a total catastrophe. Sweden is, seriously, in a do or die position” (SvD.se/congress).

21 sep. – talks fail over gang-related crime

pic: the guardian

Discussions between all of Sweden’s political parties – except SD, as discussed in this blog post – on measures to combat rising gang violence has been a hot topic. It’s been weeks. It’s been a couple meetings. And it’s all just ended with the Moderate, Liberal and Christian Democratic parties leaving the deliberations in frustration.

Johan Forssell of the Moderate party has been vocal about his impatience with the process for a while now. On Friday, he said that the government had until Saturday to get its proposal together. Today is Saturday, and the Moderate, Liberal and Christian Democratic parties have now walked because the government’s proposal did not include some of the reforms that they wanted. These included increasing the number of police working on combating gang violence, doubling the sentence for gang-related crimes, getting rid of the youth rebate for offenders under 21 (straffrabatt för unga) and scrapping the “multi-crime discount” (mängdrabatt).

Just as an aside, the multi-crime discount is a particularly interesting Swedish sentencing praxis in which the more criminal offenses committed, the less time is served for the crimes after the first one. For example, say you have committed three crimes of similar severity. You are given the full sentence for the first crime, and the time you serve for the other crimes is reduced. This means that if all three crimes would normally get two years jail time, you would serve two years for the first crime, less than two years for the second crime and even less again for the third crime. If you are of the criminal bent, you definitely want to plan your crimes so that they all come up in court at once.

At some point in history this might have made sense. It’s hard to say. But at this point in history, the Moderate party and several others are saying it’s not making sense anymore.

The government, meanwhile, is going ahead with its own list of measures, being, one must assume, the more low-hanging fruit that everyone agreed on. This list includes things like getting rid of the youth rebate after repeated criminality, giving the police more leeway for reading encrypted communications, increased sentences for conveying narcotics, and increased sentences for gang-on-gang crimes. I’m not making this up. You can read about it in SvD here.

Further, the government has plans to make it easier for the police to get a search warrant for gang-related premises, and to create a national program to help people who want to get out of being in a gang.

It’s possible the Moderate party’s Johan Forssell painted himself into a corner with his ultimatum, and then had to follow up with leaving the negotiations. It wouldn’t have been a big deal to sign off on what they could agree on, and then go on to say that he would have liked a heck of a lot more but that the other parties said no. That would have forced the other parties to explain their no’s, rather than Forsell looking a just a tiny bit pouty. The Center Party chose to stay (just another example of the ever widening split in the former alliance) and looks either soft on the Social Democrats, or smart. Or both.