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11 November 2017
(7 May 2012)
Siv Westerberg:
Norway and
Sweden – where inhuman rights prevail
Scandinavian
countries where governments, authorities and courts do not
respect the human right of children and parents to a family
life together
• • •
This article was
first published on 7 May 2012 by Pravasi
Today in Delhi.
Pravasi Today has later
unfortunately ceased publication and their website has been
taken down. The article was also published
on Forum Redd Våre Barn
(Forum Rescue
Our Children), on 3 December 2012.
It is republished here with the
author's kind consent.
Mrs Siv Westerberg is a very well-known Swedish lawyer
practicing in Göteborg (Gothenburg). Clients from all over
Sweden have sought her help over the years. A major
speciality of hers is human rights relating to family law.
She has had 9 cases against Sweden admitted to the European
Court of Human Rights and has won 7 of them. She has also
written numerous articles on these topics in Swedish,
English and German.
• • •
For the last
30 years I have devoted a lot of time to helping parents
get their children back after the Swedish state has
committed the same cruelties to them as the Norwegian state
did to the Indian family recently.
Sweden and Norway have similar legislation and similar
legal usage concerning family law. In my law-practice in
Sweden I therefore follow with interest what happens in
that field in Norway also and I recognise many issues in
Norwegian cases from similar cases in Sweden.
I have brought some of my Swedish cases concerning
compulsory taking of children into care to the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg
(http://www.echr.coe.int/echr). There Sweden has been
condemned for having violated my clients' human rights.
Sweden was condemned to pay damages to the parents and in
some of my cases also to the children. Sweden has paid the
damages. But in some of those cases Sweden nevertheless did
not give the children back to their parents.
*
The
first case I brought to the ECHR was the Olsson case:
Olsson I against Sweden 1988 and later Olsson II against
Sweden 1992 (the verdicts can be found on the ECHR
website). The Olsson case started in a similar way to the
Indian-Norwegian case.
In the Indian-Norwegian case I suppose the young Indian
mother was exhausted after childbirth and breast-feeding,
and tired from the work that goes with taking care of two
small children at the same time that she has to take care
of all the other work in a household. What such an
exhausted mother needs is some help with e.g. washing the
kitchen floor, doing the laundry, and going out to shop
food for the family. If she had lived in India she would
surely have got that help from her relatives. But she was
in Norway, for her a foreign country where she did not
understand the language. She and her husband were also
worried about their son's behaviour in kindergarten and
wanted to find out if he needed medical attention of some
sort. If the Norwegian Child Protection Service (CPS)
wanted to assist the family with appropriate help, they
could have sent a practical home assistant for a couple of
hours a day. But they did not do that. They sent a social
worker who was instructed not to give any help in the
household but to spy on the mother and give reports to the
CPS.
In the Olsson case in Sweden the situation was that the
oldest of the three children had a multi-handicap. A child
with such a handicap often has the problem of not being
accepted by other children as a playmate. So the Olsson
parents wanted to find some pleasant occupation for their
handicapped little boy. They asked the social service if
they could help find something interesting for their son to
do.
Instead of giving that kind of help, the social service
sent a "home therapist" to the Olsson family. This home
therapist was a 60-year-old woman, unmarried with no
children. She had no kind of education for a profession as
"home therapist". Just like in the Indian-Norwegian case
she started giving Mrs Olsson orders: about different
kitchen procedures, about when the family should get up in
the morning and where Mrs Olsson should put the laundry,
and commanded the family to go out for walks together with
herself.
Most housewives cannot stand another woman coming into
their home and deciding what the housewife should do. Mrs
Olsson could not stand it either. So after some days Mr and
Mrs Olsson told the home therapist to get out of their
home.
The revenge of the social service was to take all three
Olsson children into compulsory care and place them in
three different foster families very far from the parents
and very far from each other. So the Olsson children lost
both their parents and their siblings.
One of the accusations against the Olssons was that they
refused to cooperate with the social service when they did
not accept to have the home therapist in their home. But
the main accusation was that the social service declared
that Mr and Mrs Olsson were mentally retarded. When the
Olssons came to my law-office about a year after the
compulsory taking of the children had happened, my first
step was to send them for an intelligence test. The test
was carried out by a psychologist who was a university
teacher of psychology. The test result was that Mr and Mrs
Olsson were not at all mentally retarded. Mr Olsson even
had an intelligence quotient slightly above the mean.
When social services employ such methods - something they
unfortunately regularly do - any family living in Sweden or
Norway is running the risk of losing their children.
*
Just
at present we have in Sweden a cruel example of what can
happen to a family immigrating to Sweden.
Nathalia, a Russian journalist, is the mother of two girls.
They are twins and now 14 years old. The girls are steady,
intelligent and have artistic talent. They play the piano,
dance ballet, draw and write. Nathalia has always done
everything to stimulate their talents. The girls used to
say that their mother is "the best mother in the
world".
As a journalist in Russia and the Ukraine, Nathalia wrote
articles in the newspapers that were critical of the
government. But such behaviour is not popular in those
countries. Nathalia and her daughters were harassed by the
authorities, so they decided to emigrate. They got
permission to immigrate into Sweden as UN refugees.
Nathalia was promised both housing and a job in Sweden.
That was about 3 years ago. When, after a year and a half,
she still had no job and they had to live in a primitive
furnished flat in a house for refugees, she complained to
the staff in the house concerning the standard there.
The revenge of the staff was that they reported to the
social service that Nathalia was too strict with the girls.
As a result, the social workers together with the police
came to the girls' school and, using violence, took the
girls to a foster home very far from Nathalia. It happened
500 days ago and Nathalia and the girls have not seen each
other since. They are also forbidden to have any contact by
telephone or letters.
The foster parents are primitive people with no
intellectual or artistic interests. The girls are after
school forced by the foster parents to work as farmhands in
the foster parents' garden and stable.
For keeping these two 14-year old girls in prison-like
conditions, the foster family receives from the Swedish
authorities a sum of 2,080,000 Swedish crowns a year, e.g.
the equivalent of about 310,000 US dollars.
*
I
hope that the Indian government's protest against what
Norway did will spread around the world so that lots of
governments protest against how Norway and Sweden behave to
children and parents. Some lawyers here who are familiar
with many such cases and engaged in trying to help families
prevent family destruction, estimate that only 10-20 per
cent are cases that are necessary, e.g. because of abuse or
neglect by parents who are alcoholics or heavy drug abusers
and do not take care of their children. In other words, as
many as possibly 90 per cent are trumped up cases,
completely negative for the children, and altogether
unjustified.
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