Police State Aspects in Norway: The Absence of Prosecutorial Independence
by Reidar Visser
I had planned to finish an article on the latest developments in Iraq today, but the police harassment operation against me continues unabatedly 24/7, with continuous use of unconventional electronic torture devices that are likely to kill me sooner rather than later. This leaves me with no other choice but to remain focused on Norwegian police criminality and the rotten Norwegian government which is ultimately responsible for the serious human rights breaches involved in my case.
In order to make sense of it all, I am trying to isolate factors that relate to my own individual case from more general and systemic factors that pertain to Norway and other countries involved. With respect to the individual level, I was obviously vulnerable to police harassment because of social isolation. Ever since 2003, I had been working on Iraq-related issues 7 days a week, maybe 70 hours per week on average. Before that, I used to have a normal social life; by 2011, when the police began harassing me, I had few friends in Oslo where I lived. My social network consisted of Iraq-related acquaintances spread around the world. Also, in terms of my identity and citizenship I was an easy target: Having been born in Norway to parents of different nationalities, I had an incomplete sense of belonging to Norway (where I grew up but had no citizenship) as well as to the Netherlands (where I had citizenship but had never lived).
Then of course I had engaged in somewhat unusual activity, involving (perfectly legal) street photography for a fashion history project. This is where systemic issues peculiar to Norway and the Netherlands come into play. Recent weeks have seen much controversy over another, rather massive case of street photography that became controversial in the United States: Streetshot photos published on the Reddit website. Those photos differed from the ones I took in several important respects: They were focused mainly on underage women; they deliberately targeted people with minimal clothing on; they were published on the internet for huge audiences without anyone’s consent; the publication was accompanied by captions or category labels that were openly sexist in nature and clearly intended to sexualise the pictures; there was an outspoken intention to shoot the images surreptitiously for no other purpose than publishing them on the internet in the most sexualised format possible. Nonetheless, even though the legal framework governing photography in the US is similar to Norway, with respect to Reddit there was never any suggestion that this was something US law enforcement ought to look into. Instead internet vigilantism ensued, including the public outing of one of the most prolific Reddit contributors, Violentacrez. For better or worse, it seemed something of a free-speech liberal equilibrium had been achieved: If a citizen engages in controversial publication he or she may also see controversial accusations coming their own way, too.
Not from the state, though. Not in the United States, anyway. But in my own case – a far more limited, academic-related case of street photography – the response was vicious state-sponsored bullying, persecution and torture, 24/7 for more than 600 days so far. This is exceptional to Norway and the Netherlands, and it relates to systemic issues. I have already enumerated a few of them: The close personal ties between Norwegian Labour party elites and torturers and human rights criminals in the organised crime department of the Oslo police; the Norwegian “Uday Hussein factor”, i.e. the police officers who do the actual hands-on torture include people who publicly rub shoulders with government ministers; earmark budgeting by the Norwegian Labour government for developing illegal police methods like police stalking; Norway’s oil wealth as a factor that generally facilitates wasteful spending in government departments; the absence of constitutional or legal protection for sexual minorities defined in non-gender terms in both Norway and the Netherlands; the lack of an independent police commission in the Netherlands and a very weak and government-dominated one in Norway. These are deep structural problems that are reflected not only in my case but in general issues relating to the rule of law in Norway and the Netherlands more broadly. In Norway, pre-trial detention is overused and psychiatric and child custody services have a reputation for authoritarianism; in the Netherlands there is a culture of impunity for police violence. In both countries, attempts by politicians to interfere with the work of the police or the judiciary are frequent.
There is one more general police-state aspect that I have refrained from commenting on thus far: The lack of prosecutorial independence in Norway. It is a little-known fact of comparative justice that Denmark and Norway are among the few countries in the Western world where the prosecution remains police-dominated. In most civil law countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands etc.), the judiciary is in the lead with investigations, sometimes with investigative judges. In most common law countries (UK, the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc.) – some of which were previously comparable to Denmark and Norway for their police-led prosecutions – the trend over the past decades, if not earlier, has been towards independent prosecutors (district attorneys in the US) or prosecution services that are formally separate from the police.
Conversely, Denmark and Norway stand out for the more extensive role accorded to the police in the prosecution, and especially to a group of so-called “police lawyers” in those two countries. Theoretically, these police lawyers also belong to a prosecution service headed by regional prosecutors (statsadvokat) and a national one (riksadvokat); however, administratively they are attached to police districts. The higher echelons of the system – i.e. the “pure” prosecution service – tend to get involved only in very serious cases.
Proponents of the Danish-Norwegian system claim that the process whereby representatives of the prosecution are stationed in police districts enhances judicial control of the investigative process. The counter-argument, obviously, relates to the very real danger that during the course of that process, the judicial officers get progressively further removed from the judicial culture from which they originate. If this goes far enough, it will reach the point where the police lawyers become completely co-opted by the police instead of acting as a check on them. Their relations to the prosecution services as such are increasingly a matter of fiction.
It can be further argued that this tendency of police co-option of members of the prosecution is actually far more pronounced in Norway than it is in Denmark. Key variables in this respect are numbers of police lawyers and hierarchy. For an instructive comparison, consider the police districts of Oslo in Norway and Fyn in Denmark, both with a size of roughly half a million inhabitants. In Fyn in Denmark, there are 5 permanent, royally appointed police lawyers with defined thematic specialisations (advokaturchef in Danish); these in turn report to a chefsanklager (literally this means “chief prosecutor” but in practice s/he is the “chief of the police lawyers” and in turn responsible to a regional “state prosecutor” who is part of the actual, centralised prosecution service). By way of contrast, in Oslo police district in Norway, there are a whopping 140 police lawyers, 40 times more than in a similarly sized district in Denmark! There is no hierarchy and the turnover rate appears to be very high.
Other variables only underline the impression of a ragtag prosecution service in Norway. Whereas in Denmark the police lawyers are non-uniformed and work in a joint office, in Norway, police lawyers are uniformed as police and spread across the police departments instead of having a joint office of judicial expertise. Their degree of co-option into police culture is very high. To the extent that there is group ethic, it seems to relate to the police rather than to the prosecution. With high salaries in the private sectors, those law graduates that end up as police lawyers aren’t necessarily the best material available; some Norwegian police lawyers are notorious for their cluelessness.
In other words, Norwegian police lawyers walk like police and talk like police. In my case I have even had two famous police lawyers participate in harassment activities directed against me! When members of the prosecution become so enmeshed in the criminal culture of the police that they participate even in extra-judicial punishment, how can one ever dream about due process and a just prosecution? In Norway, before the pre-trial hearing stage is even reached, police lawyers have so wide-ranging prerogatives that they can do exceptional harm to innocent individuals in terms of unlawful surveillance or baseless detention – even enabling personal vendettas by their police colleagues if they want. Chances are they will never be held accountable.
What this all means is that police state tendencies can thrive more easily in Norway than in other countries. Due to the dispersion of judicial knowledge in the Norwegian prosecution system, there are fewer checks and balances and less resistance to silly ideas by police officers who are making up their own laws. In this way, the prosecution in Norway is far more susceptible to pressures from police officers than in any comparable Western system. This structural abnormality is so pronounced that only a non-comparativist can fail to take notice. It should be made relevant in any requests from Norway for international judicial assistance, especially since claims to represent the “judicial authority” in Norway (as for example in European extradition issues) can sometimes come from people who for all practical purposes are the police themselves. In this way, the point made by Julian Assange in his extradition case from the UK to Sweden regarding the nature of the Swedish prosecution and its susceptibility to outside forces could actually be made with greater weight in the case of Norway.
Sadly, the Norwegian government itself is mostly ignorant about just how exceptional its judicial arrangements are in comparative perspective. During a recent parliamentary discussion of the European arrest warrant, the ministry of justice even argued that it is unnecessary to legislate which particular level within the prosecution (i.e. the police lawyers or the state prosecutor) should sign off on a warrant! (Prop. 137 L 2010-11 chapter 11.) One of the few brave voices to speak up against the police’s dominance of the prosecution is state prosecutor Lasse Qvigstad. Of course, also the judiciary itself has a reasonable track record, with an admirable handling of the Anders Behring Breivik case even at the district court level, and a recent supreme court decision relating to free speech vs sedition in the case of the blogger and activist Eivind Berge showing that the judiciary at least sometimes has the ability to resist pressures from the rest of the political establishment.
But the basic problem consists of all the extra-judicial business that never reaches the court. Unsurprisingly, that same police-led prosecution that ruined my life because of street photography recently exonerated former police colleagues for an actual crime involving photography: Surveillance-style monitoring of the US embassy in Oslo for a private security company on behalf of the embassy. This involved not only photography (which is legal) but also efforts to identify the individuals on the photographs and their political preferences (which isn’t). As if to underline the point, that same prosecution service also recently exonerated the former police officers for having failed to declare their income from their illegal US embassy job, thereby evading income tax which they should have paid. That is the same police that fought tooth and nail against the introduction of anti-torture articles in the Norwegian penal code a decade ago. They are supported by the same Labour party that is terrified a new Norwegian constitution with a greater emphasis on fundamental rights will give too much protection (“legalism”) to its citizens.
All of the above are important factors that somehow don’t seem to fit into Freedom House and Human Rights Watch analyses that continue to give Norway unrealistic scores in international comparisons. They need to be included to show that Norway, while in many ways one of the most progressive countries on the planet, is in some ways also a judicial pariah. Meanwhile, for every single act of harassment and torture that I get subjected to by the police where I am, I’ll keep digging up and publishing dirt about Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and his criminal Labour cronies – who bankroll this whole travesty, who are ultimately responsible, and who could have stopped it with a simple phone call if they had one inch of integrity. More torture means more revelations; that’s how it works. And there is plenty of material to work on regarding them and the rotten and corrupt system they preside over.
From Michel Dakar, France
To Reidar Visser, Norway
I send you this following electronic letter written in french, because I don’t speak fluently english enough.
This letter is about the general phenomenon and particularly in France, of political police persecution process, similar to your description.
I am an activist on human rights since twenty years, on Middle East matter since ten years, and have an experience of this kind of persecution since 2006.
My extra legal personnal sentence is to be deprive of all private life. It’s a good choice, because I consider the right of the private life like one of the most precious. It looks like if they try to find a special punishment for each opposant.
The content of this letter is to complex for my modest english, so if it is easy for you to translate french in english or in norvegian, do it. If it is not, tell me, I shall give this letter to a professional translator (but you will it wait one month).
This letter explain my experience and constitute an offer to create an international network of aid to resist to this kind of extra legal and shameful persecution process. It is important that this kind of hidden facts become well known.
I prefer communicate by the post office. My address and telephone are on the top of the letter.
I have an internet site : http://www.aredam.net
Regards
Michel Dakar
Mr. Dakar, many thanks, for the comment as well as the letter. No problem with sending me things in French on my personal e-mail, I can read that without too much difficulty. I am sorry, but not shocked, that you are experiencing this kind of thing in France. France was historically in the lead with revolutions against torture and abuse of power by the courts, and yet they seem to have adopted these techniques recently. I was there for a few days myself last year during my travels.
Is it your sense that your political & activist writings are the definitive cause of the misery you are going through?
Your question :
“Is it your sense that your political & activist writings are the definitive cause of the misery you are going through?”
My answer :
I think that for the political police there are two categories of actives people in general or political affairs, and one obligation.
The first categorie gathered people that the political police is able to understand, to contain by one or an other way.
The second categorie gathered the few that the police does’nt understand, and who have no weak point usable for blackmail or manipulation. Many often these peoples of this categorie are individualists.
The alone obligation of the political police is to destroy outside the light and whithout traces the law’s activist who escape to her.
The best that they can do is the psychological destruction.
But it’s a too great purpose for them, because this kind of people (individualist laws activists) is certainly more steady, intelligent and well informed than the headquarter and think thank of policial police.
This administration can break these fragile activists, but not dominate them.
The psychological typology of peoples who belong to this police administration is based on the hate of freedom (for themselves thirst).
And the individualist activist remained free when he is broken.
It is a tiny problem for the drones-dogs of the political police. A tiny problem because the individualist activist who works for the general interest are rare and are not a danger for the order, but they are always here, so they need to spend staffs, thought, energy, time and money for mosquitoes.
I think that it is not necessary the contents of the message that cause this kind of action of the political police, but the categorie of the activist, the fact that he is a real person.
It is not so frequent in political background, because the political background must be in harmony with the mass, and the people of the mass are uniformed, theirs personalities are dissolved in the entity named mass. I have noticed that it original people are more frequent outside the political activities. In the political background I have met three times a real person during twenty years, and during these period I have met hundreds poeples.
Whe are living now the birth of a thought occidental police (the TOP … of the no-thought).
The first definition of the term “dissident” in USSR was people who think differently.
In USSR there was the office number five for dissidents (190 agents on 90 000 for the all KGB).
It always the same old fact, there was in the history of Occident an bref period without thought policy. This period is now closed.
There are now in Occident heretics, and the heresis. The heretics are peoples able to think by themselves and who are able to formulate and publish theirs thoughts.
It is my analysis.
But your must answer yourself to your question. Why they do persecute you in this sort of way ?
(I write not in English, but in Frenchglish, sorry)
The rest of the text is in French, because I have enough opened my dictionary now.
J’ai été en 1995 au Danemark, juste en-dessous de la Norvège, où j’ai résidé un mois à Frederickshaven, chez une personne que j’avais rencontré en faisant du stop en France, durant un voyage de deux années sur les routes. Cette personne était le directeur d’une école primaire de Frederickshaven, en disponibilité et avait voyagé en Europe seul dans sa voiture. Puis je suis resté un mois à Hobro (à une centaine de km au sud), chez une jeune femme que j’avais rencontrée en partant de Frederickshaven. J’ai gardé d’inoubliables souvenirs de cette période, à cause de ces deux personnes qui étaient réellement des personnes uniques et généreuses.
Je vous ai adressé sur vos deux boîtes email le même message que celui qui est paru sur votre site. Les avez-vous reçu ?
Je pense que vous avez conscience que tout ce que nous écrivons est lu par les fonctionnaires français et norvégiens, que cela soit sur votre site, le mien (et autres, le site aredam.net étant visité par environ 100 pays différents), les boîtes email, et peut-être aussi ce qui est adressé par la voie postale.
Thanks. I did indeed receive the e-mail. I thought it was better to reply on the blog since snail mail will take too long. I assume everything electronic is being read by the police but then again they can open letters too. Indeed, in Norway they deliberately held back my mail for several weeks just to prove that point.
Good to hear you had some good experiences in Denmark, though I assume this was before you were targeted. No worries about the English. I left out the longer text because of its length. If you have it in your website, maybe you could post a link?
I have sent you the same email on your two adresses (on gmail and nupi)
I realise that hey have disapeared
This the link of my texte :
http://aredam.net/A-message-in-a-bottle-sent-to-all-dissidents-in-the-Globe.htm
I have also sent you a letter by the post office, to your address (I have found the address on the web, it is a Postal Box in Oslo
I hope the letter will arrive to you.
Gardons le contact.
Cordialement
Michel Dakar
No, I did receive the email, at least the Gmail one. Many thanks. The snail mail address is Norway is not useful since I do not get mail forwarded.
I had not correctely translated your text, sorry.
I have two questions to you : why they do persecute you, after using you for their programma on Irak ?
Have you research expert to mesure nocives waves that the police throw to you ?
For a friend of me, it’s possible that they make experiment on you.
I am sorry for my frenchglish, but I have no Net connection in my home, so I communicate from the office tourist or the public library of my little town, and have not my dictionnary or time to write correctely.
Michel Dakar
Thanks. No problem with the English. I considered the political explanation but I don’t think it adds up. For example, I wrote much of my most controversial Iraq stuff without being targeted in the period 2005-2008. Also after I was targeted I was invited to conferences for the CIA and State Department. They wouldn’t have done that if they thought I was a problem. They would simply have stopped inviting me.
It is true that no one came to my rescue after I was targeted and tried to get help from the USG. Maybe that’s related to declining interest in Iraq in Washington or even the fact that some people in the Obama administration disagree with me on Iraq. But I don’t think it was the primary reason for the police stalking.
I believe Norwegian police used disruption methods on me that are normally used to put pressure on people to leave a country. The unusual thing is they apparently wanted me to flee and then come back to Norway again, presumably to generate a feeling of having taught me a lesson or some such. There is absolutely no logic in this kind of behaviour but it is the least illogical explanation I can think of.
What if you were invited just to see how much damage is “treatment” is causing you? If you had full blown paranoia of this unknown threat you probably declined to go. Looking from the side is very hard to judge since it’s not about assessing the facts, but assessing your judgments. I don’t understand what is controversial about your street photography or why would it annoy people or police? On the other hand I remember testing new brothers camera 6 or so years ago. I was sitting in the car in supermarket parking lot and took some pictures through car window. So one lady from the floral store that was right there 30 feet away took time to come out from the store and protested taking me pictures of her store. That was really strange. Of course i have to give benefit of the doubt to her being paranoid or whatever, but some people are just nutty even though the lady didn’t appear to be nuts, she appeared annoyed and looked as if she felt completely right to do that. I’m not sure if she was the owner or was told by owner to come out to do that. I’ve never been to that store before or since. It was public space, completely out of blue. It was short exchange and i forgot that. I’m not interested in photography or anything. I was just toying with this semi professional camera.
Just modeling the scenario. For police to take interest in your street photography activities there had to be some sort of tip or public outcry painting you as threat to community. Police investigate and they confirm that your activities are whatever threat to the community and decide that best course of action is psychological warfare that will make you change your ways. Maybe they feared that if they went legal route you could say that they are framing you for Iraq research. OK they succeeded – you stopped doing street photography as you mentioned. But stalking didn’t stop it probably got even worse? Why do you think is that? Goal was achieved. Threat eliminated, lesson taught. Is it a grudge? Do they want to kill you so your street photography is never to be seen again? Police is mostly structured inert force – it does what it’s been ordered or what’s benefits this power structure. Of course we can’t eliminate individual police officers acting on their own behalf or on behalf of other power structures legal or illegal, but this is a team of highly trained professionals, using expensive probably classified specialty equipment. There had to be some sort of meetings and discussions to designate people and resources to fight this “threat” caused by your street photography. So again question arises is street photography is a target or target is you.
You visited many countries while running away from this persecution did you ever noticed that rumors and degrading themes somewhat change according to local population moral values and beliefs?
Thanks. When I read about these police methods, I find that the goal is normally just to expel someone from a place or a country, and then the matter is finished. As I have argued in another article,
http://policestalking.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/an-introduction-to-police-stalking/
this more limited form of police stalking, whilte problematic, is at least possible to understand when the police perceives there is a problem and no legal remedy can fix it.
But when police stalking goes global, it becomes pointless punishment of the most medieval kind. I don’t know whether other countries than Norway do it this way, Perhaps some powerful countries like the USA may do so in extreme cases of terrorism, human trafficking or child pornography. Drones are in a way the most extreme form of police stalking imaginable. But in my case where the “crime” is so trivial and isn’t even a crime (and not a single person ever complained to me about the photos), I think few governments other than Norway would have reacted with such extreme and depraved measures. This is where the oil income dimension and the fact that Norway is the Qatar of Europe come into play. Many Norwegian state officials are allowed to throw money out the window with impunity and there is no oversight mechanism to bring an end to it.
I’ve never come upon the article where expulsion is the goal of such persecution. Could you direct me to articles describing the methodology that you feel most related to your own experiences? Maybe i’m mistaken, but I doubt average policeman is trained for such methods. I also read a lot about crime prevention being more important than prosecution and they mention operative methods, terms for applying them, etc, but never go into details. I’m talking about my own country. The police can pretty much spy on anyone and they can do it without court order legally even though it’s against constitution. Criminal law contradicts operational law. For example in 2008 police asked telephone operators 85.000 times for spying (that is legally), compare that to germany where same procedure was performed 12.000 times and population is ~30 times bigger. Police always complains about funding, staffing, crime rates are growing. So who does the all that surveillance? Very strange. Obviously not the average cops.
By law if they are suspecting illegal activity and start surveillance and it doesn’t come to fruition they have to give you gathered material and destroy it. Guess how many times it happened? Never. How many times it was destroyed? Never. I’m sure not all cases reach the courts and not all suspects are guilty, but here the cases are archived and they become perpetual suspects. Thats what is going on here that i was able to get acquainted from public sources. What is interesting that one of my neighbors upstairs master thesis of criminal law was titled “secret surveillance”. Probably just coincidence, but nevertheless the thesis work is quite interesting since it points these contradictions in law and constitution. He even admits that there is no oversight and most of the time it’s left to officers conscience.
They followed me to neighboring country where i was traveling on business and also vandalized the car by pouring transmission oil on the hood. Car was parked in private property – it wasn’t in a way to nobody. It happened a few hours after i arrived. At that time i didn’t understand completely whats going on, it was very disorientating. In previous trip they instructed helpers from romania or albania who were doing construction work to repeat degrading words when i pass by. They were pronouncing words with their own foreign accent. So expulsion isn’t the goal in my case too.
If you look at the web for a PDF report called SCDEA annual report 2011-2012, you will find that the Scottish police brags about having forced several people to leave Scotland using disruption methods.
But we wouldn’t never know if “disruption” activities didn’t follow accused persons in their new countries. So question arises how coordinated and localized these activities are. Question arises when this method is implemented and executed who coordinates it. For what we know it could be one stage of the ongoing process. I’ve never read about people who were able to escape such persecution.
Dear Reidar,
If what you are telling us is true, why not publish photographic evidence?
Take picures of Oslo police where you are and publish them here on your blog.
Evidence, in the photos I have shared I have deliberately chosen images that do not reveal the identity of the people involved:
http://policestalking.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/what-does-police-stalking-look-like/
Since I am myself the victim in a case where the presumption of innocence has been violated, publishing such pictures of assumed suspects is not my option of choice. I am trying as much as I can to generate general interest in the case in order that witnesses may come forward and a proper legal settlement may ensue.
It doubt any person who is part of conspiracy and know the details of the case would come forward. If it’s a documented and state sanctioned operation it’s probably classified and they’d be facing consequences for disclosing details. If it’s a private operation – these people are just hired hit-men. What about friends? As MLK once said “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”. Designing and luring them into some sort of honeypot? Nevertheless generating enough publicity will make them impossible to continue operation.
I tried to investigate the method of torture applied in your case as well as mine – noise shadowing from apartment above – if i could find any equivalence in scientific literature. It can’t be really that unique. There was this very similar behavioral experiment:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/12/30#
based on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear-potentiated_startle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startle_response
It even has a little video of this poor seal getting sound treatment. It will hit home for anyone who has been under such torture.
US military did some research on how to counter affects of it: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/nrl_fast_n_slow_cognitive.pdf
It is similar to what enlightened eastern thinkers say about raising awareness and seeing instead of watching. Being a witness, etc.. Of course i doubt Buddha would have survived chinese water torture, but who knows…
What is impossible to justify is the time, monetary and human resources dedicated to such operation, not to mention moral and ethical aspects. I write a lot on your blog. It did help me to look into new directions for researching to further understand and frame the problem. I post most of the stuff that i think is relevant or might be helpful.
Tikraine, thanks for your input which is always appreciated. In my case, the number of citizens cooperating with the police is very high. So they are not putting a whole lot of energy into keeping it secret. Apparently it is just a sad fact that a very high percentage of the population in so-called liberal democracies is prepared to perpetrate crimes on the instigation of the police.