In a court ruling that sounds a lot like it could have been rendered by an activist U.S. judge, a court in Sweden has ordered cops there to reimburse a convicted rioter for his legal fees.
The case, which has somewhat convoluted procedural history, is an outgrowth of civil unrest that occurred in the Sveaparken area over the 2022 Easter weekend.
In the litigation, five cops injured by a rock-throwing mob during the anarchy sought money damages from a Syrian immigrant, 45, who was found guilty of “gross sabotage against blue light operations,” the Stockholm-based Dagens Nyheter news organization reported, per Google Translate.
The supreme court in Sweden ruled, however, that this kind of offense constitutes a crime against the state rather than harming individual officers.
The cops then dropped their civil case, which may have been a flawed legal strategy under Swedish law because, according to Dagens Nyheter, “anyone who withdraws their civil case is considered to have ‘lost’ the case and must pay the other party’s legal fees.”
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The Orebro District Court then reportedly ordered them to pay up.
The five officers appear to be only the hook for about the equivalent of $1,200 U.S. dollars, but they do plan to appeal.
Johan Westberg, one of the cops who has hospitalized with a severe concussion and other injuries in the melee, told Dagens Nyheter, “I don’t intend to pay a penny. Then they better foreclose on me. This is so wrong. I was in Sveaparken as a service measure; it was not optional to work.”
Another officer, Aleksandar Jeremic, asserted, “It feels like something has gone terribly wrong in the legal system here. We are there and doing our job, yet individual police officers must be forced to pay out of their own pockets to people who really wanted us dead.”
The abuse was hardly restricted to just a handful of lawmen and women on scene.
“Several hundred police officers suffered physical and psychological injuries,” the Trelleborgs Allehanda regional news outlet reported about the April 2022 turmoil that spread to a number of cities in the Scandinavian country, in the type of activity that the U.S. media often domestically describes as “mostly peaceful protests.”
In Sweden, the issue of money damages for victims or alleged victims is usually decided within the confines of a criminal trial.
In this matter, the judge decided to rule separately on the cops’ claims.
The officers’ lawyer insisted, “It is exactly the same claim for damages as in other trials and in none of the other cases has it been separated. It is very surprising that this judge has acted this way,” Dagens Nyheter reported.
The judge apparently believed that there was insufficient evidence of the cops’ injuries, at least initially.
As a footnote, the country’s supreme court reduced the perpetrator’s sentence from five years to about three years behind bars.
For those paying attention to the Biden’s administration’s open-borders agenda, unchecked immigration, including illegal immigration, has impacted many countries in the Eurozone and has led to some serious societal upheaval that is manifesting at times as a breakdown in law and order.
That partially explains why voters in Sweden elected a right-leaning coalition government in the September 2022 general election.
The failure to secure the country’s border is also why the inept, globalist-dominated U.K. Conservative Party, or so-called “Conservative” Party, at this time is projected to lose the next general election in a landslide, even though the Labor Party would be far worse on immigration.
