Sweden: The Leander debate continues
01 January 1998
The public debate after the revelations in the Leander files has led the government to say that it will put before parliament completely new legislation concerning police registrations (records) in the spring (see Statewatch, vol 7 no 6). On the legal level the proposal will open up the Security Police files whenever a person is subject to a vetting procedure. Whether the law, which would come into force on 1 January 1999, will have any practical impact will depend on how it works in practice. It must be remembered that, according to the former Swedish personnel control ordinance, the vetted subjects where entitled to be, to some extent, informed about the content of their files. These rules were never applied in the Leander case.
At the same time there is an ongoing debate about what kind of investigations should result from the Leander case. The Government has decided to give 20 million Swedish crowns to scientific research, originally only for research of the military secret surveillance and only up to the beginning of the 1980s. Dennis Töllborg, the lawyer in the Leander case, together with other Swedish historians, have rejected this offer as military and police surveillance are so closely integrated that such a project not will be able to get to the bottom of decades of abuse. The HSFR foundation who are to handle the applications for funding have now adopted the same position. This should mean that the security police will also be open to in-depth investigation and that there will be no limitation on the period the research project will cover.
On the other hand, the former chief of military intelligence (IB, later SSI and now KSI) Birger Elmor claims, according to the Swedish Defense Staff that all files were destroyed in the seventies - a claim rejected by historians. The left in Sweden reject the idea of a research project and want instead a "truth commission" (they have not defined what this would mean). Conservatives want any investigation to be undertaken only by the established supervising authorities.
In Norway, the government is to put forward a temporary law, giving all Norwegian citizens who illegally have been surveilled by the Norwegian Security Police (POT) the right to see their files.