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Swedish prosecutor drops Nordfront hate speech investigation

Crime & justiceCrime
Key Points
  • Swedish prosecutor drops probe into nearly 200 Nazi website posts.
  • Publisher Vera Oredsson avoids liability as content was removed or edited.
  • A 2019 law allows exemption for old publications if removed promptly.

The Swedish Chancellor of Justice has closed an investigation into nearly 200 publications on the Nazi website Nordfront. The investigation concerned articles and images on the site that contained anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist content. The responsible publisher for the site, 98-year-old Vera Oredsson, who lives in Ludvika municipality, could no longer be held accountable because the articles have been removed or edited.

A constitutional amendment to the Freedom of the Press Act that came into force in 2019 gives publishers the possibility of exemption from liability for publications older than one year. If a publisher is notified by the Chancellor of Justice that a publication may constitute a crime, the publisher has two weeks to remove the publication and can thus avoid responsibility. The reported material on Nordfront is assumed to be more than a year old and has now been deleted or changed, so there is no longer reason to investigate suspected incitement against an ethnic group.

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