Sweden's Hypocrisy Denies Grimmark Work

Ellinor Grimark   Photo: Fredrik Persson / TT

In 2011, the European Council adopted a resolution that protects healthcare workers' right to freedom of conscience regarding abortion and euthanasia. Sweden has signed this agreement. But reality paints a different picture. Out of the 47 member states in the European Council, Finland and Sweden are the only two which do not uphold freedom of conscience in practice.

Ellinor Grimmark, 37, is the first midwife in Sweden to report a hospital to the Discrimination Ombudsman (DO) concerning abortion. She claims to have been discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs and moral convictions. Newly-graduated, she was fired from her position last summer because she refused to assist abortions. Even though there is a shortage of midwives at the moment, and even though she is willing to take on double shifts, she has been denied a job ever since. One employer had first agreed to hire her in spite of the “complication”, but withdrew the offer when her story began to spread in media.

Read it all here.

Kidnapped Swedish Journalists Released

Magnus Falkehed and Niclas Hammarström, two Swedish journalists who were kidnapped near the Lebanese border in Syria on 23 November, have been released, the Swedish government said today.

“We are very relieved to learn that these two journalists have been released safe and sound,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We nonetheless continue to be concerned about the 16 other foreign journalists (four of them French) and the more than 30 Syrian citizen journalists who are still held in Syria.”

Normally based in Paris, Falkehed works for many Swedish publications including the daily Dagens Nyheter and the magazine Sydsvenskan. Hammarström is a freelance photographer.

According to the information obtained by Reporters Without Borders, they are currently in Lebanon. No details about their abduction or release have so far been made public.

Source: IFEX

Immigrants Riot in Sweden

STOCKHOLM — Eva Bromster, an elementary school principal, was jolted awake by a telephone call late Thursday night. “Your school is burning,” her boss, the director of the local education department, told her.

Ms. Bromster rushed to the school, in the mostly immigrant district of Tensta, north of Stockholm, and found one room gutted by fire and another filled with ankle-deep water after firefighters had doused the flames. It was the second fire at the school in three days.

In Stockholm and other towns and cities last week, bands made up mostly of young immigrants set buildings and cars ablaze in a spasm of destructive rage rarely seen in a country proud of its normally tranquil, law-abiding ways.

The disturbances, with echoes of urban eruptions in France in 2005 and Britain in 2011, have pushed Sweden to the center of a heated debate across Europe about immigration and the tensions it causes in a time of deep economic malaise.

Read it all here.

Swedish Home School Leader in Exile

Swedish family policies are lauded for enabling women to go to work as well as have children. Sweden has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. What you can do with your children once you have them, however, is not altogether a matter of choice.

You can put them in a free kindergarten, costing $20,000 per child a year, from the time they are one year old, but if you wanted to look after them yourself at home you would be pretty much on your own. Homecare allowances are small and few and far between.

And if you want to educate your child at home, you are in real trouble. Home-schooling is banned in the Scandinavian utopia and families who defy the ban are feeling the full force of the law. Several families have gone into exile in neighbouring countries (which allow home-schooling) as a result, and a handful living on the Finnish Aland Islands were joined in early February by the most high-profile home-schooling dissident yet -- President of the Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS), Jonas Himmelstrand, his wife and three children.

For more than three years Mr Himmelstrand and his wife have had a conflict with the Uppsala municipality over educating their daughter (now 13) then their younger son (7) at home. After two years they were able to appeal to a court, but while the court decision was pending, the civic authorities continued what Mr Himmelstrand calls a “political persecution” of his family. In November they were reported to the local “social authorities” and, around Christmas, received notice of fines -- US$25,000 for their daughter’s non-attendance at school in the 2010-2011 year, and $15,000 for not enrolling their son for the current school year.

The recent punitive action occurred after Mr Himmelstrand debated home education on national radio with the chair of the Education Committee of the Swedish Parliament. Coincidence? It also came at the end of a year in which he spoke internationally about Swedish family policies, presenting a critical view based on his research for the Swedish family association, Haro.

The social authority decided not to investigate the family but told Mr Himmelstrand that if he wanted to home educate safely he should leave Sweden. Staring financial ruin in the face and refusal on the part of the authorities to discuss the issues with them, the family quietly left Sweden in early February.

”It is an incredible relief, and only now are we starting to understand the degree of pressure we have lived under for many years”, says Jonas Himmelstrand. ”At the same time it is an almost surreal experience to be forced to leave Sweden for an issue which in most of the democratic world, and by the UN, is regarded as a human right.”

He is vowing to continue the work of ROHUS. ”In fact, we will be more effective when we do not feel our families are under threat.”

According to the report here

Home education is regarded by the UN as a valid form of education under the concept of ”the right of education”. Home education is permitted in most of the world’s democracies with the exception of Germany (under their school law of 1938) and now Sweden.

Source:  Mercatornet


Related reading: Federal Government Tries to Block Homeschooling Refugees

Plavsic Released from Swedish Jail

BELGRADE (Serbia), Oct 27: Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, sentenced in 2003 by a UN war crimes tribunal to 11 years in prison, returned to her home in Belgrade after an early release from a Swedish jail.

Plavsic flew in from Stockholm on a Bosnian Serb government plane. She was whisked away in a car that drove her straight from the tarmac to her downtown Belgrade apartment.

“I’m happy to be here ... but, after nine years in prison, I don’t know what will happen,” Plavsic said briefly as she entered her apartment building. The 79-year-old said she needed time to rest.

The head of Sweden’s prison service, Lars Nylen, said Plavsic was set free on Tuesday morning after serving two-thirds of her sentence. The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, last month authorised her early release.

Plavsic was sentenced in February 2003 after pleading guilty to a single count of persecution -- a crime against humanity -- as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to drive Muslims and Croats out of Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia. Her guilty plea was part of a plea bargain to have other charges, including genocide, dropped.

Plavsic, revered during the war by Bosnian Serb nationalists as their “Iron Lady” and “the Serbian Queen,” was one of the few suspects to admit their crimes at the tribunal. In an emotional speech at a sentencing hearing, she told judges that the Bosnian Serb leadership, “of which I was a necessary part, led an effort which victimized countless innocent people.”

She added that, “The knowledge that I am responsible for such human suffering and for soiling the character of my people will always be with me.”

Her confession shocked nationalists, turning her from a hero to a traitor to their wartime cause of creating a “Greater Serbia.”

The war campaign destroyed 850 Muslim and Croat villages and included 1,100 documented murders, prosecutors said. A campaign of destruction of sacred sites laid waste to more than 100 mosques and seven Catholic churches.

Tribunal President Patrick Robinson said last month in announcing the decision to free Plavsic that she should be released “notwithstanding the gravity of her crimes.”

Plavsic, who surrendered voluntarily to the tribunal in January 2001, was transferred to Sweden after the sentencing in 2003. While in a women’s prison there, she has kept herself busy by walking and baking, Robinson said in a statement.

After her plea deal, Plavsic testified once for prosecutors, against former Bosnian Serb political ally Momcilo Krajisnik, who was convicted of atrocities and sentenced to 20 years. She served as a Bosnian Serb president from 1996 to 1998 when she turned against her wartime political mentor Radovan Karadzic, accusing the former leader of crime and corruption during his reign.—AP