Fampo, 18.06.2023
The following is written by Pål Steigan at the website Steigan.no and is translated to English with the author’s permission.
The Directorate of Health is responsible for thousands of illegal decisions. A more obvious attempt to sabotage the Civil Ombudsman’s statements in a central legal security issue has hardly ever occurred before, wrote Ketil Lund on behalf of the International Jurist Commission Norway (ICJ-Norway), the committee for legal security and psychiatry in a column in Aftenposten on 12 June 2019.
Ketil Lund is best known as the head of the Lund Commission, which was the Storting’s [the Norwegian parliament, translator’s note] investigative commission for the secret services, appointed on February 01, 1994 on the basis of many allegations of illegal surveillance of Norwegian citizens after 1945.
Lund writes in the chronicle:
“Compulsory medication with antipsychotics is a particularly invasive decision which, according to the law, requires a high probability (more than the usual preponderance of probability) of significant positive treatment effects. After a long period of criticism of the knowledge base for forced medication, this was investigated by the Paulsrud committee, which put forward a proposal for a new mental health protection act, NOU 2011:9.
The committee showed, roughly speaking, that positive effects of antipsychotics measured against placebo were approx. 20 per cent, which means that one in five patients had a positive effect of the treatment. This was not contested in the consultation round. The committee then also established that the law’s requirement of high probability was not complied with in practice.
The Norwegian Directorate of Health neglected the Paulsrud committee, indeed, even drew up professional guidelines in 2013 which claimed effects of antipsychotics several times higher than what the committee found.
The Directorate thus contributed to the still illegal practice, which in recent years has been the subject of extensive criticism.
Thousands of illegal decisions
In December 2018 and January 2019, the Civil Ombudsman issued two statements which in reality mean that the practice of forced medication has been illegal since the law was passed in 1981, and not only that, but also that decisions on forced medication, especially in the case of first-time psychosis, cannot be justified because the knowledge base does not it is possible to say with high probability that the patient will benefit.
The statements imply that thousands of illegal decisions have been made over the years.
The directorate has been aware of this since at least 2011, but instead of taking immediate steps to bring the practice to an end, the directorate has sent out several letters to county governors, health organizations etc. where once again incorrect information is given not only about the effects of antipsychotics, but also about the content of the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s statements.”
Bjørn Guldvog replied arrogantly and ignored the criticism
Ketil Lund concludes the chronicle as follows:
“It is telling that health director Bjørn Guldvog, in response to Aarre in Aftenposten on 28 May, only expresses generalities and does not even attempt to defend the directorate’s letter on professional grounds, but only arrogantly states that “we believe… the law’s strict conditions for forced treatment can be fulfilled also in the case of first-time psychosis, in line with current practice”.
A more obvious attempt to sabotage the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s statements in a central legal security issue is unlikely to have occurred before. The state should accept countless demands for financial compensation for the illegalities.”
Nine months later, Guldvog set aside the constitution and introduced the Infection Control State
The Corona Commission, which was specially composed to be as lenient as possible towards the government, established in its report that the Constitution was broken when Norway shut down on 12 March last year. Aftenposten wrote:
“It was a violation of the constitution, said commission chairman Stener Kvinnsland when he presented his report yesterday.
Minutes, text messages and the investigation by the Corona Commission show that the Constitution was not followed when Norway was to be governed through the dramatic days in March last year.
The government left the historic decision to a civil servant, director of health Bjørn Guldvog.
The constitution on which the Norwegian democratic system is built was forgotten when the coronavirus arrived in the country.”
So it was not the “King in council”, the government, that took the decision to close Norway, but a civil servant, namely director of health Guldvog. And what’s more, the Commission has not been able to find any written reasons for the measures that were introduced on 12 March.
Ketil Lund’s criticism from 2019 shows that Bjørn Guldvog has a history of setting laws and control mechanisms aside, and this behavior points directly to the coup against the Constitution and the Norwegian rule of law that he spearheaded on 12 March 2020.
Graver: – It took less than a year: The rule of law is subordinate to the infection control state
“The future many feared a year ago is all here. It took less than a year to transform Norway from a democratic rule of law to a dual state where the rule of law is subordinate to the infection control state.” Professor Hans Petter Graver writes this in an extremely important chronicle in Morgenbladet.
Graver is a professor at the Department of Private Law, UiO, and president of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and must undoubtedly be considered one of the professional heavyweights in the civil law environment in Norway. His analysis of the government’s procedures and the status of the Norwegian rule of law is devastating:
“When the pandemic hit the country, much was turned upside down. The majority did not so much notice the virus itself, as the authorities’ fight against it. Rules and routines that have been self-evident were swept aside. The community was closed down by the health authorities with the blessing of the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister, contrary to the Constitution’s requirement that important decisions must be taken by the government.
The government prepared and conducted negotiations with party groups in the Storting on a law that would give it powers of hitherto unknown scope to govern society. This happened in secret. Schools and kindergartens were closed, people were forbidden to go to their cabins, police and civil defense were put on alert if necessary to force people to obey.
Later revelations, including as recently as in Aftenposten on 10 April, show that many measures have been adopted in violation of the provision in the Swedish Infection Control Act § 7-10 that the Directorate of Health must use the knowledge prepared by the Norwegian Public Health Authority as a basis for its assessments. This may give reason to question whether they were even legal.
The health authorities have several times acted at the edge of, if not outside, what the law authorizes. They have failed to carry out the proportionality assessment that the law provides for, and which follows from the Constitution and the ECHR, when the measures limit rights that are protected by these rules. The measures are adopted without prior consultation, even if they are regulations, and forvaltningsloven [the Public Administration Act] provides clear rules for how they are to be adopted. The Storting’s authority to control the government’s use of the exemption authority in the Infection Control Act has been limited.)
Read Graver’s full article [in Norwegian] here.
Before 12 March 2020, Norway was mostly and mainly governed according to the Constitution. One year later, one of our leading legal experts, Professor Hans Petter Graver, writes:
“Society is no longer governed democratically, but autocratically by infection control experts and politicians. One sector is dominant, all other considerations are subordinate to it. The Storting has abdicated and politics is absent.”
The question is: Where does Guldvog get his instructions from?
Bjørn Guldvog does not respect the Civil Ombudsman, the Storting or the Constitution and acts as an infection control dictator without legal or health scientific basis. He has also swept aside criticism and objections from FHI. But who is he acting on behalf of? Where does Guldvog get his instructions from?
Fampo 