RESISTANCE AGAINST OPPRESSION

Remembrance celebrations of the attack against Hitler, July 20, 1944

Sixty years after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler the German government commemorated the men and women who were involved in the resistance movement. Speaking at a remembrance ceremony in Berlin, Chancellor Schröder said they had fought in hopes of being able to create a political system that would protect the freedom and dignity of all citizens.

There was one thing those in the July 20 conspiracy agreed on, and that was the need to return from arbitrary rule to the rule of law. A system of government was to be created whose purpose it would be to protect the freedom and dignity of all citizens.

"Those who sacrificed their lives at that time did not die in vain. Their example remains a living legacy", said Wolfgang Huber, Protestant bishop, when he paid homage on to them on Sunday in the Cathedral of Berlin. "They saw that doing nothing would be equivalent to being accomplices, that resistance is an ethical duty. All of them, each one in his own way, stood up for the cause of human dignity", he said.

Today, parents and other individuals in Sweden and the Nordic countries, who try to resist against the oppression perpetrated by the bureaucrats of the social services against children and their families, are subjected to several forms of persecution and administrative torture. For example, Swedish lawyers who in their capacity of public aid lawyers vindicate the right to respect of the Human Rights of their clients and their children are subjected to reductions of the fees that the courts pay them. Work-bans are imposed and they are scorned by the system - a system against which there is no recourse.

It should be noted that the head of the legal section at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Hans Corell, lawyer for the Kingdom of Sweden in the case of Olsson v. Sweden at the European Court in Strasbourg, (at present under general secretary of the UN), in an article published in the newspaper "News of the Day" (Dagens Nyheter) on April 26, 1988, threatened attorney-at-law and medical practitioner Siv Westerberg *, attorney for the Olsson family, with a work ban because, according to Corell, she "had encouraged her clients to put up resistance against the social authorities " which had taken their children into care and placed them in foster homes.

Unfortunately, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has chosen to declare the complaints made against Sweden by lawyers who have been victims of persecution inadmissible.

* Siv Westerberg is one of the founders of the Nordic Committee for Human Rights - NCHR.

Remembrance of July 20, 1944
Wednesday July 20, 2004

Barnmålen blir skenrättegångar.
Av jur. kand Siv Westerberg.

Back to Articles