One depicted three black men with nooses around their necks. Another showed Roma community leaders with text suggesting they condoned crime.
It is unusual for Swedish courts to hand out prison terms for art works. Park, who has several similar convictions, said his works were satirical and claimed the right to freedom of speech.
Here's a picture of the guy
Trying to decipher this one..
Google translate says 'Stop Violations!'
On June 14, given the controversial book "Bögjävlar" out, a deal with the Swedish contemporary gay culture. The book was written by Daniel Birch, Tomas Hometown, Stefan Ingvarsson, Petter Wallenberg and Roger Wilson, and is accompanied by a blog at www.bogjavlar.se.
The thesis of the book is that the recent years media and pop culture success of homosexuals have been "at the cost of neutering and leveling down," according to a press release. To be accepted queer worlds have adopted a cheerful smile front out to the community and made himself limited, infantile and simplistic. The book also hopes to introduce the criticism gaykulturens mainstream formulated in recent years in the United States and England. (TT Spectra)
Looks sketchy, but I don't recognize the black guy so I might be missing something.
Any swedes here able to shed more light on this & how his 'freedom of expression' plea will go?
That would be me, I suppose. I'm not sure how much light I can shed, because I haven't heard much about it myself, but I can at least translate some stuff.
"Sluta kränk!" doesn't mean "stop violations", but more something like "stop offending". The modern use of "Kränk" is more or less equivalent to the use of "offended/offensive" in English (and it has similar criticism of how people are too quick/overeager to use it and of "the offended society" etc), and if used sarcasticly can have an implication of infantilism/over-emotionality/being to easily offended.
"Bögjävlar" is two words (the Swedish language compounds words rather than leaving them apart like in English); "bög", meaning "faggot"; and "-jävlar", which directly translates to "devils" but it's usage is more like "fuckers" or "bastards" in that you apply it to group-names when you want to insult them. In short, "bögjävlar" is a common slur against gay people. So it's not likely it has anything to do with that book you linked in itself. I haven't looked into that, though. The piece itself is fairly obviously crafted to offend people, but I can't what the actual message is supposed to be out of context like that.
As for his "freedom of expression" plea goes. It's not uncommon for people sentenced for "inciting against people group" to have their sentence annulled in higher courts. At this moment I have neither any knowledge of what court level he was tried at or if he is going to appeal to a higher one.
I can't say if he was guilty of inciting against black people, romani or jews, as I haven't seen much of the art, and neither have I heard anything about this artist in the past. From what little I've seen I think that at the very least the High Court would annul it, they've done so before. There usually has to be a level of inciting beyond just expressing hate, or be expressed by activist, politicians or other politically active people for it to hold. Artists are notoriously exempt from having to take responsibility for their work in Sweden (for good and for bad), but his previous "similar convictions", whatever that is supposed to mean, might have something to do with it.
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