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Woman filmed drowning of one-year-old daughter

A 26-year-old woman in Oslo has been charged with the second-degree murder of her one-year-old daughter after she and her partner allegedly discussed how best to discipline the child in an online video chat session.

Published: 5 January 2012 10:17 CET
Updated: 5 January 2012 14:16 CET

The incident took place at around 3am on October 10th last year. With the child still lying awake, the woman and her boyfriend, who lives in the United Kingdom, spoke about what they should do.

After they had deliberate, the child’s mother then went and got a bucket, filled it with water, and held the child’s head under the surface until she stopped breathing.

“The accused has explained that her boyfriend helped her with disciplining the child, and that he suggested holding the child upside down in a bucket of water,” prosecution lawyer Kristin Rusdal told newspaper VG.

As her 33-year-old boyfriend followed the events on his computer screen, the woman called for an ambulance and the girl was taken to the National Hospital, where she died the next day.

The woman explained that the girl had drowned after falling into a bucket of water. A post mortem examination proved inconclusive, but police found the mother’s explanation difficult to believe and soon launched an investigation into the infant’s death.

The woman has admitted to the facts of the case but told police she only intended to discipline the child, not to kill her.

Prosecution counsel Kristin Rusdal said, however, that police believed the child was subjected to serious physical abuse in the period prior to her death.

Oslo police are currently seeking to have the woman’s boyfriend brought to Norway to face trial. He has been charged with acting as an accessory to murder.

Police said the pair had formed a romantic relationship over the internet but had only met in person on one occasion.

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Is Oslo's project to speed up work permits on track?

For years, Norway has been grappling with a shortage of skilled professionals, notably in the technology and IT sectors.

Recognising the need to address this talent gap, The City of Oslo and other partners launched a pilot project in 2023 called Kompetansespor (Competence Track).

The primary goal was to reduce the lengthy wait times for skilled workers to get work permits from around nine months to three days.

READ ALSO: What’s next for Oslo’s plan to slash work permit waiting times?

But what is the current status of the project? And is the new super-fast work permit process any closer to becoming a reality?

How the project has evolved in 2024

Since its inception, Competence Track has evolved into a more ambitious project that goes beyond just cutting work permit times.

The project’s focus has shifted towards new goals, which mostly revolve around exploring the use of a “digital wallet” to streamline the immigration process.

To make this happen, partners involved in the project, such as the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), will collaborate with other key stakeholders from the governmental, municipal, and private sectors.

READ MORE: How Norway’s permanent residence rules have been tweaked

As the UDI explains in a document seen by The Local, a digital wallet refers to “an electronic application or platform that allows users to securely store, manage, and share digital identity credentials and other types of digital data,” which plays a “central role in handling digital evidence or verifiable credentials in a digital ecosystem.”

The wallet allows relevant authorities to access the holder’s paperwork, rather than having documents and credentials stored separately across several portals.

New goals

The main aim for 2024 is to develop and explore an efficient and user-friendly process flow that can support the immigration of skilled workers to Norway.

According to a document that the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) shared with The Local, other goals for the year include creating a prototype to test the efficacy of the digital wallet in improving immigration processes, investigating the feasibility of pre-qualifying employers to speed up the immigration process, and showcasing how collaboration across sectors can create better services for users.

The project remains committed to reducing administrative burdens, processing times, and information exchange accuracy, as well as preparing Norway for future challenges related to global mobility and digitalisation.

Meanwhile, the Oslo Business Region writes on its website that additional target groups such as students and family members of work permit applicants would be included in the fast track residence permit scheme.

From the information available at the time of writing, it seems that project will still revolve around Oslo.

Gustav Try, an advisor at the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), told The Local that the UDI’s Department of Managed Migration is currently working on a new test phase called “Pilot 2.0”.

“We are currently working on Pilot 2.0, but it is not finalised. The plan is to pilot it on selected students at the University of Oslo (UiO) in August. We are also considering piloting it on skilled workers, including UiO employees, throughout the autumn,” the department said.

Back in September, Thea Ullhaug Pope, senior content developer for the City of Oslo, told The Local that one of the long-term ambitions of the project is to try and get the scheme adopted by other regions and then nationally.

However, while the Competence Track project continues to progress, it seems unlikely that the initial ambition of reducing work permit waiting times from nine months to three days will be achieved on a mass scale anytime soon.

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