Policing protests - Gothenburg June 2001
01 November 2001
Have the police learnt lessons, or will there be a stronger response next time? By Janne Flyghed, Stockholm University
The events surrounding the EU summit in Gothenburg in the summer of 2001 have once again focused attention on the wisdom, legality and consequences of certain police activities. We have been presented with account after account of abusive treatment, physical and psychological violence, and the provision of inadequate information - often no information at all - about the reasons for detention or arrest. We have been told of degradation, long periods in police custody, in certain cases (primarily involving foreign citizens) extending up to a couple of days, without being told why and with nothing to eat or drink; private possessions were ransacked and in several cases destroyed - particularly cameras and film. In short, a veritable catalogue of offences against the most elementary principles of a state supposedly governed by the rule of law. We were “treated like terrorists and hooligans” as one of the arrested youths put it. Several different sources present similar descriptions of the civil rights violations and injustices that took place. But despite this level of agreement, it remains difficult, not to say impossible, to be sure how much of what we are being told is in fact true. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that only a small proportion of these reports have a sound basis in fact, however, we are facing a very grave situation indeed. For this reason, the material compiled here raises a great many difficult and unpleasant questions.
The rule of law
How could so many of the basic principles of the rule of law be undermined over the course of just a few days in Gothenburg? On several occasions, the police - with or without the approval of their superiors - acted in a judicial vacuum, which clearly allowed too much room for the making of arbitrary decisions in relation to individual incidents. We must not forget, of course, that the police are entitled to use force. Their central task after all is the maintenance of “public order and safety”. In this they are permitted by law to resort to the use of force in certain circumstances, and in certain extreme situations even the use of deadly force. There must however be a concrete need, which is to say that measures short of the resort to force must be insufficient; and the use of force must constitute a reasonable means of carrying through the measures at issue, i.e. the use of force must be proportional to the threat posed. It is not altogether clear what is included in the concept “public order and safety”. Lawyers have made several more or less unsuccessful attempts at defining the content of this phrase. In his classic book När och hur får polisen ingripa? (Where and how are the police entitled to intervene?,1978), Erik Sjöholm writes that while the concept of "public safety” may be relatively uncomplicated from a juridical point of view, the concept of “public order” is extremely complex, since it is highly “changeable and elastic and is also defined by unwritten norms”. These are conditioned by prevailing social, ethical and moral perceptions, values and conventions, which are affected not only by general societal trends at the aggregate level, but also by current ideas and conditions in different areas and even in the same area at different times.
In practice, these formulations are weak and provide little guidance for the actions of the individual police officer in a concrete situation. Since these are first and foremost quite general clauses, a great deal of room is left for discretion. This becomes particularly evident in the context of sizeable public order disturbances. In a stressful situation, how does one decide how much force is “no more than the situation demands”? When even lawyers are not sure what is meant by “public order and safety”, how is a police officer to decide? Clarity and explicitly formulated directives from se