Week 46: Debaters criticize Sweden's climate policy and new constitutional amendment

The UN climate summit in Egypt has raised questions about Sweden's climate policy and responsibility internationally. Several debaters also criticize the Swedish constitutional amendment on foreign espionage, which they believe makes it more difficult to review international collaborations.

The UN Climate Summit COP27 in Egypt and Sweden's responsibility for climate policy created strong reactions in the debate during the past week.

EU Member of Parliament Alice Bah Kuhnke (MP) writes in ETC about the representatives from climate-affected countries such as Sweden's climate and environment minister Romina Pourmokhtari (L) has met at COP27. 

- For them, Pourmokhtari will explain that Sweden, one of the world's richest countries, chooses to lower the prices of petrol and diesel. That Sweden, in the midst of a climate crisis, makes it cheaper for rich people to increase emissions and worsen climate change further, she writes.

Although Aftonbladet's lead writer Ingvar Persson is critical of the new government's climate policy.

- At the same time as the UN chief warns of a "climate hell", the government has given up on Swedish climate policy, he writes.

The editorial writer Mattias Svensson at Svenska Dagbladet says however, that one should be skeptical of talk of a climate crisis. He believes that we need to develop new and more efficient energy sources and ways of traveling - and to spread such innovations in the world without trade restrictions.

- But cooperation between politics, technology development and markets is the realistic way forward, which will lead to reduced emissions in the long term and be liveable in the meantime, he writes.

Swedish constitutional amendment threatens to restrict press freedom

The Swedish constitutional amendment on foreign espionage that the Riksdag has voted through has also sparked debate. The law makes it a criminal offense to disclose information that could harm Sweden's relations with other states and international organizations. Critics believe that the constitutional amendment makes it more difficult for journalists to review Sweden's international collaborations. 

Erik Larsson writes in an editorial in About the World that many fear that the constitutional amendment will involuntarily lead to the media and organizations within civil society being silenced. He wonders, for example, whether the new law had could be used against the UN diplomat Anders Kompass - who between 2014 and 2015 leaked information about the sexual abuse of children by UN soldiers in the Central African Republic.

DN's lead writer Amanda Sokolnicki is critical of the fact that the media have not put politicians against the wall before the constitutional amendment.

- It cannot be considered anything other than a fiasco, she writes.