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Why a Swedish official’s trip to the Canary Islands has caused such an outcry

A trip by one Swedish senior official to visit family in the Canary Islands over Christmas has sparked anger that could threaten the country's coronavirus strategy focused on individual responsibility and public trust in authorities.

Published: 5 January 2021 17:45 CET
Why a Swedish official's trip to the Canary Islands has caused such an outcry
In this picture from January 2020, Civil Contingencies Agency chief Dan Eliasson (R) is seen with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/TT

What’s happened?

In a nutshell, the man at the head of Sweden’s crisis preparedness agency travelled to visit family in the Canary Islands over Christmas, at a time when everyone in Sweden was supposed to be avoiding travel unless absolutely necessary.

Dan Eliasson, the general director of the Swedish Contingencies Agency (MSB) has not apologised for the holiday.

“I have refrained from a great deal of trips during this pandemic but this time I felt that we wanted to celebrate Christmas together,” he told the Expressen newspaper, whilst he was on holiday in the Canaries.

“I have made the assessment that the trip is necessary. I have a daughter who lives here and works here. And I celebrated Christmas with her and my family.”

According to Expressen, he spent his trip working remotely, celebrating Christmas and New Year with family, but was also photographed with others on New Year's Eve.

The trip has prompted anger from many in Sweden, who see it as an overly generous interpretation of the national recommendations which said only necessary travel should go ahead.

What do Sweden’s restrictions say about travel?

Over the Christmas period, the Public Health Agency urged everyone in Sweden to “think about whether travel is really necessary”. It urged particular caution for trips to large cities or popular holiday resorts, and said anyone who travelled should avoid making new contacts during the trip and at their destination beyond their 'bubble' of no more than eight people total.

When The Local asked the agency's Karin Tegmark Wisell what applied to people whose close family live overseas, she said: “Travel as little as possible. If you have to travel, do it in an infection-safe way, and you should stick to your small circle [of close contacts] and not mix with other circles and bubbles. There we see that there is a big risk of increased spread of infection.”

The Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said, ahead of Christmas: “It is important that everyone who intends to travel considers whether it is really the right time to do it now. We prefer that as few as possible travel this Christmas. If you nevertheless decide to travel, it is important that you follow these three pieces of advice: Read up, follow local rules and plan your return trip.”


Photo: Stina Stjernkvist/TT

So did Eliasson break any laws?

No. Sweden has introduced very few laws under which individuals can be prosecuted (exceptions include a ban on organising public events for more than eight people). 

Instead, Sweden has relied on recommendations, which authorities including the MSB have repeatedly stressed should not be seen as optional.

Have any other officials bent the rules?

Several. Both the Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Justice Minister Morgan Johansson were spotted shopping in December, after guidelines were introduced to avoid busy places such as shopping centres.

Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson was photographed renting skis at a Swedish resort just before Christmas, and the heads of two other Swedish state agencies travelled to Swedish ski resorts according to Svenska Dagbladet.

The head of the Migration Agency also travelled overseas over Christmas, to his partner's home country of Malta, saying she needed to visit home for “a range of personal reasons”.

And a senior member of the opposition party the Moderates was in the Canary Islands over Christmas, and has apologised for this, acknowledging the impact on public trust.

What is the role of the Civil Contingencies Agency?

It is one of Sweden's state agencies, independent of the government, although the general director is appointed by the government.

The agency is responsible for managing issues related to civil defence, emergency management and public safety. Its actions during the coronavirus crisis have included regular polling of the public on how many infection prevention measures they are taking, and sending an SMS to the Swedish population in December reminding them to follow the national recommendations.

How has the public responded?

Not positively. A poll by the Aftonbladet newspaper on Tuesday showed that only six percent of the public said they had “very high” or “fairly high” confidence in Eliasson, while 62 percent had “very little”.

The Facebook pages of the MSB and other government agencies were bombarded with comments criticising the trip, prompting a communications staff member at MSB to say “the trip was a private trip that the general director made after a personal judgment”.

The incident has also garnered international attention, with reports on Eliasson's holiday in the BBC and New York Times among others. 

Dan Eliasson speaking at a coronavirus briefing in May. Photo: Fredrik Persson/TT

How have the government and agencies responded?

It's not clear if Eliasson will face any consequences for the trip, but he is set to meet Interior Minister Mikael Damberg this week.

Svante Werger, an advisor at MSB, said at Tuesday's coronavirus press conference in response to a question from Dagens Nyheter: “Trust is very important to us […] I don't have any comment on trust in Dan Eliasson but when it comes to the agency, I think it would be very surprising if it were not affected by this incident and the reporting on it.”

The Local asked state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell if he was concerned that these incidents might damage the overall strategy based on trust in authorities, and he said, “I don't know, we'll see how that develops over time.”

We also asked if he could give any clarity on how to define “necessary travel”, given that many people in Sweden with family overseas avoided travel over winter to comply with the guideline. He said: “That doesn't really change. Necessary travel is travel that cannot be avoided and there can be a number of different reasons to do that. We still believe that it's good to cut down on travel as much as possible.”

Will Sweden introduce more specific guidelines about what constitutes a necessary reason to travel or visit shops?

The Local put this question to Anders Tegnell on Tuesday. He said:

“No, I think it will remain individual decisions. Any attempt to make it more specific I think confuses people more than it really helps them. It's much better to have a general rule or recommendation to avoid meeting people at close distances as much as possible instead of going into detailed rules that are much more difficult to follow and makes for trying to find shortcuts around them instead.”

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Why Sweden’s Chat Control vote is causing parliamentary chaos

Sweden's government last week rushed a controversial EU internet surveillance proposal through a parliamentary committee, opening the way for it to be voted through by the European Council. What's going on?

Published: 24 June 2024 14:08 CEST
Why Sweden's Chat Control vote is causing parliamentary chaos

What happened last week? 

After more than nine months of silence on Chat Control, the informal name given to the EU’s proposed “Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse”, the government last Tuesday rushed a compromise proposal drawn up by the Belgian presidency through the Swedish parliament’s Justice Committee.

The representatives for the Green Party and the Left Party – both of whom are opposed to the measure – then somewhat mysteriously backed the government’s position without leaving a dissenting opinion. 

With only the Centre Party and the far-right Sweden Democrats opposing, Sweden’s government could then claim parliamentary backing for supporting the Belgian compromise at a planned meeting of the EU Council on Thursday. 

“Now our judgement is that an important step has been taken,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer told TT in a written statement on Tuesday. “The government is therefore ready to take the next step and allow the EU Council and the Parliament to begin negotiations.” 

Sweden Democrat MP Adam Marttinen pointed out that both the Moderate and Liberal parties had criticised the proposal during the EU election campaign, saying that they would not push forward with the proposal, only to do so days after the election was over. 

“I think that was dishonest with voters,” he told TT. 

The Chat Control proposal was, however, not discussed as expected at the EU meeting meeting on Thursday, raising questions over whether it can be handled by the EU Council during the Belgian presidency. 

What is Chat Control? 

The proposal was put forward by Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, in 2022. It aims to combat child pornography by forcing all encrypted messaging services operating in the EU to build in an “upload moderation” system or “backdoor” into their programmes.

This will allow all images and videos to be scanned for child sex abuse material before they are encrypted and sent to the recipient. 

The check would start with images and messages which have already been flagged as child pornography, but it would also look out for new abuse material. 

Users would have to give the messaging service they are using permission to scan their messages, and be stopped from sending videos or images if they do not give it.

The earliest proposal, from 2022, envisaged giving the upload moderation system the power to scan all messages, but the scope of the law has now been limited to image and video files. 

How would it work? 

That is unclear. One option is for the moderation system to be installed on each device used to send messages. Another is for the unencrypted message to first be sent to a cloud server for checking. Both are technologically tricky. 

“No one knows exactly how this would be done. There’s no technical description yet and that’s perhaps what is most frightening, that they are making laws and rules without knowing how they can be safely implemented,” Måns Jonasson, an expert at the Swedish Internet Foundation, told the TT newswire. 

Why is it criticised? 

Critics argue that by removing the possibility of having end-to-end encrypted communication within the EU, at least for ordinary, non-tech-savvy citizens, the law threatens to sharply circumscribe EU residents’ right to privacy. 

“How can this scanning be done in a safe way?” Jonasson asked. “If I take a picture of my children at the beach will I suddenly get flagged up by police for sending abuse material? Would teenagers sending naked pictures to one another also get flagged up? There are a thousand questions that haven’t been answered, and that’s even before you starting talking about whether it’s reasonable that all citizens’ mobile telephones and all images should be under surveillance by the police.”  

A risk, he said, was that once encrypted services had compulsory backdoors in place, authorities and potentially even hackers might use it for other purposes. 

“There are good examples of this. When you build in this kind of back door then it ends up being used by bad actors,” he said. 

And the group of people most likely to find a way to evade the controls, he said, were paedophiles. 

“If you’re a paedophile, you want to hide your activities so if you know that certain apps are being surveilled, then you’re obviously going to use other apps, so the question is why we should do it at all if it’s only those of us who are innocent who are going to be affected.” 

Why did the Green Party and Left Party MPs go against their own party lines? 

That is the mystery. The Green Party initially claimed that Rasmus Ling, the MP on the committee, had simply made a mistake. 

“In hindsight, we should have left a dissenting opinion, but we didn’t. It was a mistake. It is human to sometimes make mistakes,” the Green MP Rebecka Le Moine, who sits on the Swedish parliament’s EU committee, told TT.

“There are two separate versions, the Council’s compromise proposal, which is so general in its text that we cannot back it at all. Then there is a proposal that the Green group in the EU parliament have developed, which we back.” 

But internal messages obtained by the freelance journalist Emanuel Karlsten seemed to show that this was not the case, and that Ling knew exactly which version he was backing, and made a judgement that the compromise solved some of the issues the party had had with the original proposal. 

The Left Party representative, Gudrun Norberg, also claimed to have made an error. 

“It is true that I did not register a dissenting opinion at the committee meeting. That was a mistake and I truly regret it,” she wrote on Facebook. “It did not affect the result of the meeting and the question on Chat Control is far from fully determined. It will come before the [Swedish] parliament’s EU Committee, among other bodies, further on in the decision process.”   

What happens next? 

What last week’s decision does is open the way for Sweden to back the Belgian government’s compromise proposal in the EU Council, which – now that France has opened up to supporting the proposal – means there is no longer a blocking minority of countries in the EU Council of Ministers. 

This will theoretically allow the EU Council to take a collective position on the proposal, meaning negotiations can start with the EU Parliament. 

But, according to Karlsten, last Thursday’s meeting may have been the last chance for Belgium, which currently holds the EU Presidency, to put the measure forward, meaning the responsibility may now pass to Hungary. 

Politics in Sweden is The Local’s weekly analysis, guide or look ahead to what’s coming up in Swedish politics. Update your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your inbox. 

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