The Swedish Board of Migration backs down

Swedish Board of Migration loses its precedent-setting anti-Israel case.

In a landmark victory for democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and sound common sense, the Swedish Board of Migration has turned tail and decided to reinstate sacked employee Mr Lennart Eriksson.

This after a senior officer at the Board of Migration, Mr Eugène Palmér, launched his own state-financed anti-Israel campaign abusing his position of power as Mr Eriksson’s employer. The failed campaign has cost the already hard-hit Swedish taxpayer enormous sums of money in compensation and legal costs.

28 months ago, Mr Eriksson was summoned to his then head of department, Mr Eugène Palmér, who summarily informed him that as Eriksson had used his own private computer at home to write in his own blog that Israel was a democracy, he was no longer considered suitable as head of an asylum assessment unit at the Migration Board. Mr Palmér further informed him that it had come to his notice that Eriksson voted Conservative and that this was an “unorthodox” choice for an employee of the Board of Migration. The Conservative Party is the largest political party in the ruling Swedish government coalition.

Lennart Eriksson was removed from his position as head of the asylum assessment unit so he took his case to court. A verdict in county court ruled that the Migration Board had acted unlawfully, whereupon the Board used a technical loophole in Swedish legislation – and Swedish taxpayers’ money – to buy out Mr Eriksson from his position. Mr Eriksson has no legal right to contest this move and was accordingly forced to accept the financial settlement in lieu of his job and future professional and financial prospects.

However, he again took his case to County Court. The Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman, in a verdict in September 2009, ruled that the Board’s actions had contravened Mr Eriksson’s civil and human rights. Eriksson’s lawyer, Mr Allan Stutzinsky, argued among other things that the Migration Board had used public funds to purchase Mr Eriksson’s democratic rights, an act that he contested was illegal according to the Swedish constitution. The Swedish constitution protects the right of every citizen to freedom of expression and opinion, and using money to buy someone out of his job on account of the opinions he expresses in his private life contravenes these fundamental rights.

In uncharacteristically forthright criticism of the Migration Board’s heavy-handed trampling of those rights, the Parliamentary Ombudsman advised the parties to come to an agreement in keeping with the law of the land.

Accordingly, Lennart Eriksson has been fully reinstated, he has been granted additional compensation, and all legal costs for both parties are to be borne by the Swedish Board of Migration. In other words, the Swedish taxpayer is funding the failed anti-Israel adventure of Swedish government employee Mr Eugène Palmér.

There is now considerable domestic criticism of the high cost to the taxpayer of the Migration Board’s attempt to regulate Swedish citizens’ voting patterns through the use of public funds.

Mr Eugène Palmér, who instigated the scandal by sacking Lennart Eriksson on account of his privately held political views, has been removed from his operational post. He still receives full pay courtesy of the Swedish taxpayer but his salary is no longer linked to any specific assignment or operational requirement. At Swedish taxpayers’ expense, he has been given what is euphemistically known as a “sideways promotion”. He is being kept out of the public eye since it is felt he will be less able to do public-relations damage to the Swedish Board of Migration, which is still formally his employer.

According to Swedish newspaper reports, there are insufficient legal grounds for Mr Eriksson to bring charges of slander. Furthermore, no disciplinary action is being taken against Mr Palmér by the Migration Board since the incident occurred more than 24 months ago – at 28 months since the start of this case, it is now too late to implement such a procedure.

The conclusion of the case against the Swedish Board of Migration comes hard on the heels of other events widely seen both here in Sweden and abroad as part of a concerted Swedish attack on every aspect of Israel’s legitimacy. Perhaps foremost among these incidents in the past year is the debacle of the Sweden-Israel Davis Cup tennis match in Malmö, when attempts were made to prevent the Jewish contestants from playing. When that failed, a ban on spectators was imposed, and finally violent riots took place in the streets of Sweden’s third-largest city.

Other remarkable incidents making the international headlines include Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet’s unsubstantiated allegations of systematic Israeli organ theft from Arabs (a claim later withdrawn and refuted); Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt’s pressure on the EU to acknowledge the partitioning of Jerusalem and his insistence that it be recognized as the capital of a future Palestinian state, while signally failing to recognize any part of it as the capital of the already existing Jewish state; and the decision a couple of years ago not to prosecute in a case in which the imam of the Grand Mosque of Stockholm called for Jews to be killed as a result of the Middle East conflict. This was passed off as “part of the expected discourse on the subject of the Middle East”. Sweden otherwise has and imposes extremely strict anti-hate laws to protect its other minorities. Jews are an officially recognized minority in Sweden and Yiddish is granted the status of recognized minority language.

Jews and Zionists in Sweden now routinely conceal their affiliations in a climate that shows increasingly open – and official – animosity to Israel and Sweden’s Jewish minority.


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Swedish Board of Migration uses taxpayers’ money to buy off pro-Israel employee

The Swedish Board of Migration recently lost a landmark court case after it attempted to sack an employee in Gothenburg, Sweden, for his private opinion that Israel is a democracy. The court ordered the Board of Migration to reinstate the employee. In an unprecedented turn of events, the Swedish Board of Migration has instead chosen to use public funds to buy off the employee rather than reinstate him – a move that, even more remarkably, is permissible under Swedish law and cannot be contested.

The Swedish Board of Migration demoted its employee Lennart Eriksson after he was found to operate a website in his private time and from his own home computer in which he maintained that Israel is a democracy and mentioned that he votes Conservative. He was told by his manager that these were “unorthodox” views. It should be pointed out that the coalition government of Sweden is led by the Conservatives, and Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East, holding free elections.

The Board of Migration then took steps that in effect demoted Eriksson, measures that the court ruling in November this year equated with unlawful dismissal from his place of work. As such, the Board of Migration’s actions were deemed in contravention of Sweden’s tightly regulated employment legislation.

In its judgement, the court did not take up the issue of whether Eriksson’s demotion and sacking violated his freedom of speech, an issue that he wanted tried in court, focusing solely on the actual legalities of his dismissal. It found that his dismissal was illegal.

After the verdict was announced, both Eriksson and his legal team expected that he would be fully reinstated and allowed to return to his job, a job that he had always fulfilled to the total satisfaction of both his co-workers and superiors. However, the Board of Migration announced in mid-December that it has no intentions of obeying the court order and instead chooses to use public funds to pay 1,203,200 kronor ($155,000) in dismissal compensation to Ericsson, a measure that, although seldom if ever implemented, is actually allowed under Swedish employment law.

Lennart Eriksson comments: “I expected that following the court’s verdict, the Board of Migration would respond in accordance with democratic precepts. I expected it to respond in a manner that the general public would regard as fair and above board. I see instead that the Swedish Board of Migration is prepared to spend any amount of taxpayers’ money to prevent itself from losing further face by reinstating me as required by the court’s verdict.”

The Swedish Board of Migration’s new strategy will cost Swedish taxpayers about 1.5 million Swedish kronor including legal fees. This money would have been sufficient to pay for six new asylum assessors for one entire year, during which period they would have been able to process at least 700 asylum applications. The Board’s operations in Gothenburg are several thousand asylum application cases in arrears owing to managerial inefficiency. The decision to use public money to pay off an efficient employee rather than reinstate him as required by the court verdict therefore seems even more incongruous.

This situation is brought into even sharper focus by the fact that the person brought in to replace Lennart Eriksson following his unlawful dismissal has herself received a remarkably poor rating in her job. So much so that she has voluntarily left her position, previously Lennart Eriksson’s position, which is now accordingly vacant – but which the Swedish Board of Migration will not fill with Eriksson, the person most competent to do the job, while at the same time saving a lot of public money.

Eriksson’s manager, Eugène Palmér, stated in court that he appointed managers by “gut feeling”. His gut feeling justifying Eriksson’s dismissal on grounds of “unsuitability” was notably inaccurate because Eriksson has consistently received top ratings for the way he has done his job, and equally inaccurate regarding his replacement who declared herself incapable of filling Eriksson’s position and voluntarily gave up the post.

Eugène Palmér also went on record in court as claiming that Lennart Eriksson refused to obey orders. He claimed that this disobedience was in line with the behaviour of a figure of great historical significance that Eriksson admired, WW2 General George Patton. Palmér claimed that he knew that Eriksson’s behaviour was modelled on that of Patton, and that he also knew that Patton had a history of disobeying his superiors because he “once saw a Hollywood movie in which this was mentioned.”

At no time has the Swedish Board of Migration appealed the verdict of the court. This would seem to indicate that the Board does not take issue with the findings in the case, but that it merely opts to use public funds to get rid of all employees who do not conform to the private political beliefs of its top managers.

The Swedish public are asking how it is possible to have faith in a publicly funded authority which demands that court verdicts be implemented for asylum cases it presents to court, but which fails to observe court verdicts when it finds itself in the dock. What is more, there are commentators and analysts in the Swedish press who have drawn parallels to Kafkaesque black comedy and Soviet-era hounding of dissidents who fail to toe the official party line.

Lennart Eriksson can be contacted for comment on lennart@lennarteriksson.se, phone +46 702 672 333.

Swedish Board of Migration Loses Landmark Court Case

A year ago, Lennart Eriksson, an asylum unit manager at the Swedish Board of Migration was demoted because he privately expressed admiration for US WW2 General Patton, because he regarded the US as a democracy and because he supported Israel’s right to exist.


Lennart Eriksson took his employer to court on the grounds of wrongful dismissal. Today the court reached its verdict: Lennart Eriksson has won his case on every count.

The court’s verdict is as follows:

The court regards the demotion of Lennart Eriksson as a clear case of attempted dismissal and concludes that this dismissal is illegal.

The court orders the Swedish Board of Migration to pay Eriksson damages to the tune of 100,000 Swedish kronor plus interest.

The Swedish Board of Migration has been ordered to pay Lennart Eriksson’s legal expenses in full, to the tune of almost 150,000 Swedish kronor plus interest.

Collapsed defence
The court did not find the defence arguments put forward by the Swedish Board of Migration to be valid. Palmér had called into question Eriksson’s ability to cooperate in the workplace, but all Eriksson’s previous managers and colleagues had the highest of praise for the ease with which he interacted with everyone at work.

Conservative politics “unorthodox”
Eugène Palmér had commented on the fact that Eriksson is a Conservative, saying that this was “rather unorthodox”. In this context it is worth mentioning that the ruling government coalition in Sweden is led by the Conservative party.

The court found in Eriksson’s favour that he had been demoted because he expressed, in his private time, opinions in support of democracy and because he was a Conservative, two viewpoints that appeared to be at odds with those of his manager, Eugène Palmér. The court found that Eriksson’s demotion was a discriminatory measure. In its ruling the court found that the demotion was an illicit means of coercing Eriksson to leave his job owing to his private political beliefs in democracy and his Conservative politics in a country governed by a Conservative-led coalition.

Discrimination and other illegal practices
The court also found that as part of the Migration Board’s discriminatory treatment of its employee, Eriksson had been receiving a lower than normal salary. The fact that Eugène Palmér offered Eriksson two years’ full pay if he resigned was taken by the court as a sign that the aim from the very outset had been to get rid of Eriksson.

Swedish Migration Board bases its policies on Hollywood movies
In a move highly unusual by Swedish standards, Eriksson’s request for compensation and full legal costs was ratified by the court without any reduction. This may be interpreted as an indication of the court’s feelings about the Swedish Board of Migration and its top officer, Eugène Palmér. Palmér said in court that Eriksson was unsuitable for his job because of Eriksson’s view that US WW2 general Patton was a great general, whereas Palmér knew for a fact that Patton was a disloyal and insubordinate officer because he “once saw a Hollywood movie about this”.

Lennart Eriksson can be contacted for comment on lennart@lennarteriksson.se, phone +46 702 672 333.
His lawyer Allan Stutzinsky can be reached on allan.stutzinsky@glimstedt.se, phone +46 31 710 4000 or +46 705 172 043.