Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

COURT

Court orders teens who raped boy to be deported

Five teenagers convicted of raping a boy in Uppsala are to be deported, an appeals court has ruled, partially overturning a previous verdict which said they should stay in Sweden.

Published: 8 March 2017 12:46 CET
Court orders teens who raped boy to be deported
File photo of a court room. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

The teens, aged 16-17, forced the younger boy into a wooded area in the Gottsunda district of Uppsala in October last year and then gang-raped and beat him at knife-point.

In December, Uppsala District Court sentenced four of them to one year and three months in a closed facility for juvenile offenders, and the fifth one, aged 16, to one year and one month.

However, it refused the prosecutor's request to also send them back to Afghanistan after they had served their punishment, given their age and the security situation in the country.

The latter point was then also brought before the appeals court, which threw it out on Wednesday, ordering their deportation and banning them from returning to Sweden for ten years.

“Several factors come into play when you consider deportation. First, it's a question of the seriousness of the crime. It's often said that if the offence carries a penalty of more than one year it may be grounds for deportation. In this case, the crime was far more serious,” the president of the Svea Appeals Court, Fredrik Wersäll, told the TT news agency.

The second factor is the person's ties to Sweden.

“In this case the court of appeals notes that the boys do not have a link to Sweden. Then you also try the issue whether it's possible to execute a deportation order. In this case the appeals court does not have its own expertise, but relies to a significant extent on the Migration Agency's opinions,” added Wersäll.

The court also ruled that the teenagers should be treated as adults and that hence any humanitarian reasons not to send them back were not strong enough to prevent deportation.

The boys all came to Sweden as refugees unaccompanied by any adults, and Wersäll said that the judges had very few previous court cases to rely on as guidance or precedence.

“It's simply because the phenomenon of unaccompanied refugee children is not something that has been around very long. New issues arise in a refugee situation like this. It is not particularly strange then that courts reach somewhat different conclusions,” he told TT.

COURT

French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts

A French court has ordered Twitter to give activists full access to all its documents relating to efforts to combat racism, sexism and other forms of hate speech on the social network.

Published: 7 July 2021 10:03 CEST
French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts
Photo: Alastair Pike | AFP

Six anti-discrimination groups had taken Twitter to court in France last year, accusing the US social media giant of “long-term and persistent” failures in blocking hateful comments from the site.

The Paris court ordered Twitter to grant the campaign groups full access to all documents relating to the company’s efforts to combat hate speech since May 2020. The ruling applies to Twitter’s global operation, not just France.

Twitter must hand over “all administrative, contractual, technical or commercial documents” detailing the resources it has assigned to fighting homophobic, racist and sexist discourse on the site, as well as “condoning crimes against humanity”.

The San Francisco-based company was given two months to comply with the ruling, which also said it must reveal how many moderators it employs in France to examine posts flagged as hateful, and data on the posts they process.

The ruling was welcomed by the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), one of the groups that had taken the social media giant to court.

“Twitter will finally have to take responsibility, stop equivocating and put ethics before profit and international expansion,” the UEJF said in a statement on its website.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy bans users from promoting violence, or threatening or attacking people based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability, among other forms of discrimination.

Like other social media businesses it allows users to report posts they believe are hateful, and employs moderators to vet the content.

But anti-discrimination groups have long complained that holes in the policy allow hateful comments to stay online in many cases.

French prosecutors on Tuesday said they have opened an investigation into a wave of racist comments posted on Twitter aimed at members of the country’s national football team.

The comments, notably targeting Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe, were posted after France was eliminated from the Euro 2020 tournament last week.

France has also been having a wider public debate over how to balance the right to free speech with preventing hate speech, in the wake of the controversial case of a teenager known as Mila.

The 18-year-old sparked a furore last year when her videos, criticising Islam in vulgar terms, went viral on social media.

Thirteen people are on trial accused of subjecting her to such vicious harassment that she was forced to leave school and was placed under police protection.

While President Emmanuel Macron is among those who have defended her right to blaspheme, left-wing critics say her original remarks amounted to hate speech against Muslims.

SHOW COMMENTS