Swedish police, in a press release published on Thursday, April 6th, announced that they had appealed the decision by Sweden’s Court of Administrative Law to overturn a decision by the policing authority to ban Quran-burning protests.
“The police authority believes that the issue is fundamentally important and that it is, therefore, urgent that it be examined by a higher authority,” the Swedish police wrote on their website.
Danish-Swedish political activist Rasmus Paludan’s Quran-burning protest outside of the Turkish embassy in late January infuriated Ankara and triggered widespread outrage in the Muslim world, leading to protests throughout the Middle East and calls for a boycott of Swedish goods. The protest, additionally, gave the Turkish government more reason to block Sweden’s accession to NATO.
Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the Sunni Muslim world’s preeminent religious institution, which called for the boycott, also accused the Swedish government of “protecting barbaric crimes under the inhuman and immoral banner they call ‘freedom of expression.’”
The following month, another two Quran-burning protests that were set to take place were banned at the last minute by Stockholm police, who stated the inflammatory demonstrations pose a threat to “Swedish society at large.”
However, earlier this week, on Tuesday, April 4th, Sweden’s court of administrative law ruled that security risk concerns did not outweigh the Swedish people’s right to demonstrate, with Judge Eva-Lotta Hedin saying that the “police authority did not have sufficient support for its decisions” to ban the protests.
The court’s ruling enraged the Turkish government, prompting the country’s foreign minister to compare Sweden to Nazi Germany.
“The Nazis started by burning books, then they attacked religious gathering places, and then they gathered people in camps and burned them to achieve their ultimate goals,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu claimed, before suggesting: “That’s how things like this start.”
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, April 7th, the Swedish press reported that Ulf Boström, the integration police chief in Gothenburg, has called for Paludan to be prosecuted for the Quran burnings, arguing that the Danish-Swedish activist, through his stunts, is inciting hatred against ethnic groups.
