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Legal security is threatened by discriminating
attitudes
In general, Swedes have a
tolerant attitude towards immigrants. But we tend to judge a person from his accent. We
are impressed by an American who speaks Swedish, but suspicious of an Afghan who
speaks Swedish. We judge accents based on perceived cultural distance between us and
the speaker’s country of origin. An immigrant from a (culturally) far away country who
needs an interpreter – an interpreter that often speaks foreign accented Swedish – in the
court room, affects the opinion and consequently threatens the legal security.
Every tenth court proceeding in Sweden is performed with an interpreter. Niklas
Torstensson at Umeå University concludes in his recently published dissertation, Judging
the Immigrant, that in the bilingual court room some immigrant groups are at a double
legal disadvantage when being judged. A report from the Swedish National Council for
Crime Prevention (BRÅ), together Torstensson’s dissertation, prompted the court of
Appeal for Western Sweden in Gothenburg to arrange a development day earlier this
year, discussing racial discrimination in justice decision-making. The judiciary thinks it is
unprejudiced, but is often unconsciously affected by the foreign accented Swedish in their
judgment.
Visby, May 2010
Jenny Nordenankar
EDITOR
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