In 2018, a 13-year-old Swedish girl, Saga Antonsson, was raped by a close family friend. The man was convicted of rape and imprisoned, but in 2021, after her attacker had been released, Saga heard his business mentioned on a radio programme. She shared the programme in two Facebook groups and warned others about the man who had assaulted her.
Those warnings resulted in Saga, then 17, being convicted of aggravated förtal – defamation – and ordered to pay her attacker SEK 30,000 in damages. Not because she had lied, but because under Swedish law even telling the truth can constitute defamation if disseminating the information to a wider audience is not considered justifiable.
The judgment is grotesque in itself, but it also stands as a symbol of a peculiarly Swedish self-image that for decades elevated almost limitless consideration, understanding and inclusion into moral ends in themselves – and which Sweden now finally appears to be confronting.
The Humanitarian Superpower
For many years, Sweden described itself as a “humanitarian superpower”, a moral beacon leading the rest of the world with its open borders, boundless tolerance and willingness to include almost anything and anyone in Swedish society in its determination to set the highest humanitarian standards.
But when consideration for others becomes a moral end in itself, it becomes harder to make demands, draw boundaries and defend society’s own interests. The Saga case illustrates this priority taken to the point of absurdity: a rape victim warns others about the man convicted of raping her – only for the legal system to protect the perpetrator’s reputation against his own victim.
Defamation law necessarily entails a balance between freedom of expression and the protection of an individual’s reputation. But in Sweden that balance has reached the point of absurdity when a convicted paedophile and rapist has a stronger claim to protection of his reputation than his victim has to warn others about him.
This mindset has been allowed to permeate Swedish society as a whole, where the urge to demonstrate understanding and inclusion has obstructed the willingness to make demands, draw boundaries and speak openly about the consequences of mass immigration, integration and crime.
The consequences have proved impossible to explain away.
Reality Caught Up With Sweden
Sweden has now been hit so hard by the consequences of this boundless openness and understanding that the Swedish government describes the situation as a threat to the system itself.
When Ulf Kristersson formed his government in 2022, he stated that immigration to Sweden had been unsustainable. His government announced a paradigm shift in migration policy and a change of perspective in criminal justice policy.
Over successive elections, Swedish voters turned the Sweden Democrats into an increasingly large party, while the other parties sought to keep it out of political influence. After the 2022 election, that was no longer possible. The Sweden Democrats became a crucial part of the parliamentary basis for Kristersson’s government.
The voters had moved. Eventually, politics had to follow.
Which brings us back to Saga Antonsson.
On 17 August, the Swedish government appointed a parliamentary constitutional committee whose remit includes reviewing the rules on förtal and strengthening the protection of people who, on the basis of well-founded information, speak publicly about serious sexual offences or warn others about a sex offender.
Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer places the reform within a broader “shift in perspective from the perpetrator to the victim and the protection of society”.
That is quite an admission. Because if the perspective must now be shifted from the perpetrator to the victim and the protection of society, the government is simultaneously saying something rather important about where that perspective has been until now.
Sweden is beginning to correct a balance that had gone badly off course.
When Sweden Stood Firm
Seen from Denmark, the development is thought-provoking.
For many years, the roles were reversed. Denmark went through the Muhammad cartoons crisis and learned early what it cost to defend freedom of expression under religious and international pressure. To many Danes, Sweden became the very embodiment of conflict avoidance, political correctness and a narrow corridor of permissible opinion.
But during the Quran-burning crisis, the roles were reversed. Both countries came under intense pressure from Muslim countries following public burnings of the Quran. Denmark gave in and passed its Quran law.
Sweden stood firm.
And while Sweden now wants freedom of expression to carry greater weight against the protection of a sex offender’s reputation, Denmark has just seen a Supreme Court ruling in which six of seven judges accepted that a Muslim student teacher could, on religious grounds, be exempted from a school’s ordinary handshake rule, provided that she refrained from shaking hands with both men and women.
These are very different cases. But the direction of travel is worth noting: after years of serious problems, Sweden has begun to rediscover the importance of boundaries, protecting society and robust principles. Not because of some sudden Swedish epiphany, but because reality has forced the country to confront the consequences of a course it pursued for far too long.
For decades, we looked to Sweden as a warning.
Now Sweden is beginning to wake up.
The question is whether Denmark is falling asleep.
