This Isn’t My Sweden Anymore — But It Could Be

How a human rights lawyer came to question the very system they swore to uphold.

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Here in Sweden, behind every deportation decision, every surveillance proposition, every rejected asylum case, is a deeper ideology: that human worth is conditional. That rights must be earned. That survival is not guaranteed.

This is the system I’ve come to know, not just as a jurist, but as a human being living and working inside it. And what I’ve seen is not justice. It is a slow, quiet violence cloaked in legal formalities.

This piece is a follow-up to Sweden on Trial: Climate Betrayal, Racism, and the Silence of Complicity — an article that traced how Sweden’s rightward shift and neoliberal consensus have hollowed out the meaning of justice, citizenship, and solidarity. That piece examined how environmental collapse, racism, and legal repression are not separate crises, but symptoms of the same system. This piece continues that investigation — through the courtroom.

It also owes a debt to Neal Haddaway’s essential work exposing how global systems and structural forces — from structural adjustment programs to food imperialism — shape migration patterns by design, not accident. His recent investigations uncovered how EU trade policies, climate…