Julian Assange in Sweden by Guy Sims

Author:Guy Sims [Sims, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2012-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

C

hapter 29: Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask

During Assange’s five weeks in Stockholm, the Minister of Justice in the Swedish government was Beatrice Ask. Here is a short biography of her.

Beatrice Ask was born in 1956 in the hamlet of Sveg, 435 km north of Stockholm With just over 2,000 inhabitants, Sveg is the biggest settlement in the rural county of Jämtland. This county belonged to the Kingdom of Norway until 1645; its inhabitants have a strong dialect.

She attended Uppsala University during 1978 and 1979, where she read International Economics, but never graduated. In 1979 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the Swedish Conservative Party (Moderata samlingspartiet) and continued to climb the Party hierarchy ladder, becoming Sweden’s Minister of Justice on 6 October 2006 under Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, despite having no legal training. She was elected Vice Chairman of the Party in 2009.

She never married but lived together with her partner, Christer Wennerholm, who is also a prominent politician in the Swedish Conservative Party. They had a son, born in 1981. However, ten years later Christer Wennerholm discovered that he was gay and left her and went to live with his boyfriend.

Many years later, in his blog dated 7 August 2006, Christer Wennerholm wrote, “What a fantastic feeling to be one of the 30,000 who were in the Pride parade, received with rejoicing, love and warmth by 350,000 people who lined Stockholm’s streets on Saturday. … We who went under flag of the Conservative Party were cheered a little extra by many along the route.”

In this blog he also praised Sweden’s Conservative Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt (who later incorrectly claimed that Assange had been prosecuted); “Today, Fredrik Reinfeldt launches the care guide reform… the new Conservatives are taking health care seriously ahead of this autumn’s elections.”

In February 2010, Beatrice Ask proposed that judges is Swedish courts should no longer be appointed by the government but that anyone should be able to apply for a job as a judge, the job applications to be considered by a Judge Committee.

A month later, on 19 March 2010, in a speech to a seminar on prostitution, she proposed that glaringly coloured envelopes be sent through the post to suspected purchasers of sex, to their home addresses, in order to embarrass them.

“I want to send garish envelopes to people who purchase sex, because I think that the worst thing that can happen to a sex purchaser is that someone in his vicinity gets to know what he has done, his wife or a neighbour. We should have mauve envelopes, it shall be made clear that you are suspected of having gone out and bought sex.”

After some criticism, Beatrice Ask modified her proposal, “In purely practical terms we can’t have coloured envelopes but we must know who they are and let people in their vicinity know about it.” She continued, “The family ought to know what they are doing. I think it would put much more pressure on them than anything else, in the sense that many would stop doing it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.