Welcome to this episode of “Ask the Lawyer” with Johanna Carsbrant!
Johanna is a human-rights activist, journalist & law student. She, herself, is also a victim of discrimination by the municipality.
Johanna sits down with lawyer Johan Åström (00:37) and lawyer Elisabeth Scheffer (36:21) to discuss cases where children have been removed from their parents on hasty, arbitrary, illogical and, ultimately, unlawful grounds by the Swedish social services on the grounds of the law “Lagen om vård av unga” (LVU).
We hear about the shocking statistic that only 3% of the children who are removed from their parents are later returned.
In today’s show, we discuss a hypothesis about how certain people within the government, municipality and social services might profit from connections with care homes (Hem för vård och boende, in short,”HVB”) where taken children are placed (this financed through taxpayers’ money).
The problem does not stop there: Swedish Police and the prosecutor’s office seem resistant to investigating incorrect handling of cases or cases with alleged corruption of the Swedish authorities, especially those related to LVU.
Furthermore, the situation seems to become worse within the court system! We find evidence of many judges who won’t overturn the decisions of the Social Services. This happens even though the parents can show through proof, law sources (both Swedish Law and articles in the European Convention of Human Rights, Charter of the United Nations and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and logical reasoning that the Social Services has performed illegal, biased, unethical and illogical investigations. Further, the social services’ reasoning behind their decision to remove the children and the decision itself can’t be regarded as in the best interest of the child!
Many judges seem to start out being partial to the Swedish state in the way that they presume that the social services have conducted a proper investigation before removing the child, therefore refusing to allow or disregarding any line of evidentiary presentation during the hearing or in written submissions. This implants a confirmation bias within the judges which risks having them draw wrong inferences and uphold the LVU-decision.
The host and her guests also discuss cases where LVU should have been invoked in the best interest of the child but has not happened. The devastating results of such neglect of duty are discussed.
Elisabeth Scheffer talks about her organization The Nordic Committee for Human Rights (https://www.nkmr.org/en/about-nkmr-en/what-is-nkmr-en) which consists of caring lawyers, jurists and ex-judges working in the children’s best interest. She will also share how the Swedish government and top politicians both physically and verbally tried to stop her and her colleagues from speaking about Swedish corruption (and how it hurt Swedish Children) in front of the EU parliament in Brussels. However, members of the European Parliament from other countries, especially Denmark, stepped in and called for Elisabeth’s and her colleagues’ voices to be heard.
Elisabeth will also talk about incidents within the School of Social Work, which trains future social workers. She tells of students chanting “death to the family” and glorification of actions shattering the family union.
Furthermore, Johanna and Johan will explain how parents can use certain legal paragraphs to lift the secrecy surrounding LVU-decisions.
We also cover that not all LVU-decisions are corrupt and harmful to the children. Many actually improve the life of the child who gets to leave an abusive and neglectful environment and disturbed or drug-addicted parents. However, if corruption, biases or incompetence are involved it can create severe, life-long harm to the children and parents. It is critical to discuss these hypotheses so that those worse-case scenario cases can be prevented.
Thanks for watching!
Please note: We have several brave and honest jurists as well as law professors and former judges involved in the program as advisors.
If you are a jurist, from the media, or a concerned citizen in some other professional who cares about human rights and wishes to help us, to be interviewed, have a case or questions you want us to discuss? Get in touch for a future program. Contact following email Fraga.juristen (at) outlook dot com.
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