Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [117]
In short, to defend Swedish democracy against real or presumed anti-democratic threats. They were chiefly concerned with the anarchists and the neo-Nazis: the anarchists because they persisted in practising civil disobedience; the neo-Nazis because they were Nazis and so by definition the enemies of democracy.
After completing his law degree, Edklinth had worked as a prosecutor and then twenty-one years ago joined the Security Police. He had at first worked in the field in the Personal Protection Unit, and then within the Constitutional Protection Unit as an analyst and administrator. Eventually he became director of the agency, the head of the police forces responsible for the defence of Swedish democracy. He considered himself a democrat. The constitution had been established by the parliament, and it was his job to see to it that it stayed intact.
Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the Right to Free Speech (R.F.S.). This guarantees the inalienable right to say aloud, think and believe anything whatsoever. This right embraces all Swedish citizens, from the crazy neo-Nazi living in the woods to the rock-throwing anarchist – and everyone in between.
Every other basic right, such as the Formation of Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On this law democracy stands or falls.
All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the R.F.S. are set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (F.P.). This defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to publish child pornography and the depiction of certain violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or exhort someone to crime. It is forbidden to defame or slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the persecution of an ethnic group.
Press freedom has also been enshrined by parliament and is based on the socially and democratically acceptable restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of the legislation has it that no person has the right to harass or humiliate another person.
Since R.F.S. and F. P. are laws, some sort of authority is needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.
The first is the office of the Prosecutor General, assigned to prosecute crimes against F. P. This did not please Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the Prosecutor General was too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view, direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The Prosecutor General usually replied that the principle of democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This attitude, however, had come under question more and more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hårdh, the general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, had submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor General’s want of initiative over a number of years. The report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and convict anyone under the law of persecution against an ethnic group.
The second institution was the Security Police division for Constitutional Protection, and Superintendent Edklinth took on this responsibility with the utmost seriousness. He thought that it was the