The protest, which is set to be held in central Malmö on the afternoon of May 3rd, has been granted permission by police to go ahead.

“We can’t reject [the permit]. Police have been criticised when we have rejected permits in various ways. There have been court decisions and we look at each case very thoroughly. But every situation is unique,” senior police officer Per Engström told the TT newswire.

“This is a call for everyone in the area to let it pass. The purpose is to cause offence and upset, but we’re telling the public to try to keep calm,” he added.

EXPLAINED:

• When does a Quran burning qualify as a hate crime?

Several other, separate, protests are also expected to go ahead in Malmö in the coming week, both in support and in protest of the European Broadcasting Union’s decision to let Israel participate in the song contest despite the brutal war with Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has warned its citizens not to visit Malmö during the week of Eurovision.

Quran burnings have become a hot topic in Sweden in recent years, including sparking fury in several Muslim countries which even put Sweden’s Nato application at risk. In Malmö, which has a large Muslim population, similar incidents have sparked riots on some occasions.

Police have little power to prevent protests featuring Quran burnings due to Sweden’s strong freedom of speech laws.

That’s not to say that setting a religious text on fire could never be prosecuted under hate crime laws (it all depends on context, as this court case shows), but Swedish law says that the police are only allowed to refuse a permit for a demonstration if it is “necessary to do so with respect to public order or safety at the gathering or, as a direct consequence of the gathering, in its immediate surroundings”.

This means that they cannot refuse a permit even if somebody says they are going to do something illegal, as long as it doesn’t endanger anyone.

Another application for a demonstration permit from the same people, a man and a woman, to walk through Malmö on Saturday while carrying Israeli flags and pulling a copy of the Quran on a leash has been denied by police. That’s because two people going for a walk through the city does not qualify as a public gathering and therefore does not need a formal permit.

A third application to burn a copy of the Quran in Rosengård, an immigrant-heavy area of Malmö, on Sunday is still being processed by police and hasn’t yet received a decision.

Updated to add the last two paragraphs