Can you give five examples?
There's only really been two cases. One is a case where a Swedish Christian Democrat politician brought up what the opposing council in a certain dispute had done previously and was convicted of defamation for this. Another is a case where a Swedish journalist was convicted of defamation for that he brought up that a guy who was suing people for all sorts of rubbish was himself criminal-adjacent in that he had been prosecuted for animal cruelty, but had remained outside the country until the state of limitations came into effect.
And the echr gives a lot of leeway to national laws
Edit: And the EU charter is basically the ECHR but with some minor additions and it's own court.
Yes, but the decision of what is contrary to the ECHR is made by the ECHR and they always give pretty ample margins to member states. The ECHR is supposed to be a lower limit on what protections are given. Not the ultimate authority on what protections should be given.
Maybe they'd rule these cases in violation, all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be shocked if they didn't
> the EU charter is basically the ECHR but with some minor additions and it's own court
No, actually it's completely different from the ECHR. The ECHR is a treaty which applies to all actions and legislation of the parties.
The EU charter is specifically targeted at EU law. It is a protection against interference originating in EU law and its scope applies only to EU law and its implementation.
So if your rights are violated due to an EU regulation you have recourse because of the charter, if they are violated due to how your country implemented an EU directive you have recourse, and if they are violated by your country because of how they are enforcing some legislation you have recourse.
However the member states themselves could pass their own law completely violating these principles and as long as it doesn't infringe on EU competences you'd have no recourse (well, you'd still likely have the ECHR)
I believe that the government would have lost if this had been brought to the ECHR.
To me it's obvious that you either ignore or is unaware of constitutional limitations of the criminalisation of defamation, notably in ECHR and three constitutional laws. If you spread defamatory 'truths' in a free speech setting where the victim can defend themselves you'll easily get away with it.
The New York Times had an article a few years ago about Swedish defamation law in the context of the #MeToo movement, so there’s another example for you.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/15/opinion/cissi...
And it's not an article, it's an opinion piece by a person who also claims to have been mistreated by Virtanen and helped spread Wallin's statements about him: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/granskning/ug/reportern-skrev-att...
Edit: Should probably add that there is very little chilling from our defamation criminalisation, it's commonly used in far right political activism for example. The Lamotte case is an outlier where I think the victim didn't engage the cops and ran his own civil case against him instead.
No, it's absolutely not irrelevant. The court refused to consider whether Wallin's claims were true because it held that they would be criminally defamatory even if true.
> In this case, despite Mr. Virtanen’s being one of the highest-profile writers at the country’s largest newspaper, the court concluded that he was not enough of a public figure to justify public interest in his personal conduct. Ms. Wallin’s posts, in other words, were not justifiable, and as a result, it didn’t matter whether her account of their encounter was accurate. “The court will not review whether the statements were true,” the verdict read.
In a country where truth is a defense against defamation charges, like the US, the court would have had to have considered whether Wallin's claims were true. Because Sweden does not consider truth a defense Wallin didn't even have the opportunity to present a case for truth.
Wallin has had every opportunity to "present a case for truth" but hasn't, and it's likely impossible to determine since the accusations were brought forward after a very long time. You should also know that Wallin has been harassing public servants because the authorities put down a dog that belonged to a friend of hers.
Here's a better source about the defamation case: https://www.nj.se/nyheter/aven-hovratten-foller-wallin-for-f...
I’m not sure why you are bringing up irrelevant facts to make Wallin look bad, so I won’t bother responding to them.
Cases where the truth of the defamatory statements cannot be determined are out of scope. However, such harm would reasonably be covered by the same line of argument.
In some situations swedish courts have to consider the truth of the statements in defamation cases. The regulation is much more sophisticated and detailed than you seem to think.
The ECHR is great and I believe that both these cases, if the people convicted had sued Sweden in the ECHR, then Sweden would have lost.
However, Swedish law is still Swedish law. Parliament is sovereign and can what it likes, legal as illegal. It'd be great to have an ECHR judgement against Sweden in one of these cases, it would have given weight to the need to change these laws into something with respect for truth, giving us a chance to throw away the tradition of the courts to regard reputation as something belonging to a person, when reputation is other people's beliefs. There should only be protection against reputational harm from falsehoods.
ECHR is applied in swedish courts, it's swedish law and constitutionally limits every other regular law.