28
votes
Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik is suing the state for allegedly violating his human rights due to his being held in extreme isolation
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Norwegian mass killer Breivik sues the state for "extreme" isolation -lawyer
- Published
- Aug 18 2023
- Word count
- 236 words
He's done this before, and will do so again.
This is a high stakes case.
Every other time they've made sure to evaluate the matter from several angles, including the balance between the public's need to see such a killer punished and the need to not become inhumane as a society.
Edited to add:
As far as I am aware, he has been given visitation persons that come and talk with him, and while that isn't the same as freely being able to talk to several other people in an open common-area, it does mean he has others to talk to than just his guards.
Also, there is the question of how safe he would be around other prisoners. He would be an easy target for aggression.
While Norwegian prisons are a far cry away from the American ones, they're not quite as idyllic as the media likes portraying them as.
There's no prison in the world where Breivik doesn't get killed. There's no society in history where he wouldn't have gotten drawn and quartered already. He's just never going to be safe around other people.
I don't know how to feel about this. One part of me wants to say: Good, maybe he should have thought about the consequences of his actions before he did it.
But the more compassionate person in me wants to believe that every human being, no matter how evil, is entitled to a certain rights. Food, water, shelter, and safety are pretty obvious rights. But are socialisation, entertainment, and something that gives life meaning also necessary? I'm inclined to say yes, but I'm also not sure on this and open to having my mind changed. What are other people's thoughts?
Edit: also, how do these rights interact with each other? If the right to socialisation conflicts with the right to safely which takes precedent? Is it even possible to have the two interact?
I agree with you I think, but I suppose it depends on the reasons for his isolation. If it’s keeping him or others safer, I suppose it’s the lesser of two evils. If it’s pure retaliation, then it’s not acceptable. Vile as this man is, his sentence was to take away his freedom, not to take away his humanity.
He can recieve visitors, as long as they are approved first. Not too many want to, is all. He has also had people assigned to him as professional visitation/to have someone to talk to.
He is not quite as isolated as he claims, and it is also unfortunately such that he is extremely disliked because of what he did.
Oh well in that case it sounds like he’s made his own bed and is mad about having to lie in it. If he’s not even happy about people being forced to visit him, I’m not sure what else you can do. I imagine there’s a valid reason why he isn’t allowed to mix with other inmates
Pretty sure that has to do with the fact he had shoot up a summer camp that was for teens. So pretty sure it is for his own safety and probably the other prisoners safety also.
A correction, nobody is forced to visit him. There's just a difference between an assigned visitor to talk to, and someone coming as a friend or as family. They're professionals, but not forced.
Yes sorry, I was being a bit glib! I did understand what you meant
The article, and probably the man himself, isn't being entirely honest there. He does have visitors other than the guards. But they've been appointed visitors, and not just anyone at any time. So not the same as being a free man, but then again, he would likely not be alive for long if placed in a more open space with other prisoners.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/20/anders-behring-breiviks-human-rights-violated-in-prison-norway-court-rules
Sounds like he does not actually have any visitors, but that’s because literally nobody wants anything to do with him. Problem of his own making as I see it.
Solitary confinement is a form of torture. I think this is too huge a topic to only see it from the angle of this specific case. It's not just about having access to entertainment, but more about humans being a social animal which suffers in isolation.
But even being against solitary confinement, this doesn't stop me from finding it absolutely hilarious to see a far-right terrorist being forced to argue from a human right perspective.
Notice how your compassion is after the fact. That is, a mass murder becomes who they are after committing mass murder and gazing the consequences? I don't have a shred of sympathy or compassion for a mass murderer facing the consequence of their actions. Mf even had the audacity to pull the victim card.
The only time I would have some degree of sympathy or compassion is if the "mass murderer" was only labelled so for mostly self-defense. For example, a "mass murderer" kills a whole gang ala John Wick narrative. But even then, in that story, they all reaped what they've sown.
Let's look at it this way, each killing equals one less right. So, even if all seven are your rights, he's currently at negative seventy rights.
Obviously, I'm all for humane rehabilitation and consider America's blood thirsty prison culture to be abhorrent but for him, I'll make an exception. I'm not saying to make him a martyr or anything but lock him in a hole and feed him stale bread.
He does. They have to be approved, but that's about it.
It's just not too many that want to. He has also had people assigned to him as a kind of professional visitor to have someone to talk to on the regular outside of his guards.
To answer your last question, I don't think the ultimate goal of incarceration should be suffering.
We live in a society, and rely on distribution of thought and labor to progress further than we could as smaller family groups. This is built on a foundation of communication and trust; boundaries are specified, and (supposedly) everyone operates under the same set of rules (laws).
When someone threatens society in some way, they lose privileges. If they pose a large enough threat, they are temporarily or permanently relocated from society at large into a controlled environment, to reduce the harm they can cause.
Rehabilitation is a lofty goal of incarceration, that may or may not be possible for all offenders. Deterrence has been justification in the past for inhumane treatment, but the effectiveness is completely unproven. Punishment as the primary goal of incarceration is fraught with moral questions.
We can treat the incarcerated with dignity, without intentionally causing suffering. Removing their ability to interact with society should be the point, not squeezing retribution from the metaphorical stone.
I don’t know why entertainment or socialization should be rights and in this case, the meaning of the rest of his life should be limited to being a cautionary tale for others that might seek to emulate him. In that vein, if anything, having unlimited time to watch TV and play video games seems like a bad thing for disaffected young aspiring mass murderers to be considering as a possible worst case outcome.
It might seem like it, but are there any stats or anything to prove whether it does or doesn't? US prisons aren't known for being a relaxing vacation, yet more and more people keep ending up there.
I think that's really the thing people should focus on. Firstly, the person being locked up means they aren't a danger to anyone else. Secondly, is the system more effective at handling or reducing crime or recidivism and proving to be a net benefit compared to other systems used elsewhere. After that, you never even really need to think about them again. You're never going to have something perfect, the best you can hope for is to be leading the pack and improving on what anyone else is doing.
If we're going by our intuitions (which as I said isn't necessarily the right thing to do), I could also argue that it seems like most people who would commit such atrocities probably didn't arrive to such a situation because they were concerned about how they would be treated in prison. It's not like someone just one day wakes up and goes "Shit I could get unlimited time to watch TV and play video games, all I need to do is murder 80 kids".
I’m not sure that this class of criminal operates by the same statistical rules as others. Most criminals expect to get away with it, which is why the harshness of the penalty is irrelevant. These criminals are making a statement and expect to be caught — their plan is generally to maximize their “high score” before ultimately being taken down or surrendering. They are frequently copycats, inspired by their predecessors, and it is almost certain that they will be looking closely at not only the tactics but also the current whereabouts and situations of their role models. Not much we can do about those who are looking for suicide by cop unfortunately.
Give the person a choice. It's their life. The chosen punishment is locking up, not torture by solitary confinement or living in fear of one's own life every day, so that's something he can choose for himself imo
Others should also have a choice not to want to be around this dude for safety reasons, though
He isn't as isolated as he claims, though he isn't free to wander communal areas with other incarcerated people either.
He has had visitation people assigned to him several times through the years. Not sure what they're called in English, but "soul carers" would be the approximate translation "sjelesørger". He can also have other visitors as long as they are pre-approved.
It's just not that many that want to. Also, I am not sure he would stay alive for too long if he was to be left to his own devices in a less secure facility together with other people.
I wondered about this since I was a child, because I tend to agree. As I've grown older and seen more wrongful convictions, I've started to figure this is why people say we shouldn't judge over life and death (even if they don't believe in a deity).
But I don't really know. If it becomes an option, it should at least have a waiting period (five years?), so the person doesn't make a rash decision based on the stress of the trial and the media and probably distancing of family and everyone you knew. Probably a lot of people would want to die then, who'd later rather sit out their life, and only one of the options can be undone so the permanent one should be unavailable until absolutely sure, and it should be the person's own choice.
We are surprisingly often wrong about who's guilty, but the person themselves can make that choice to continue or not. We were apparently prepared to pay for bread and board and supervision and healthcare for life. Them taking the shortcut doesn't really harm anyone on an individual level and has benefits on a societal level, why not make that option available?
Heck, why isn't it already available? I've not heard it spoken, but is a reason (which many people might not want to admit) that they want to see the perpetrator suffer as long as possible instead?
He isn't actually that isolated though. He is segregated partially for his own safety, and he also has assigned visitors, he can send letters and recieve them, he can recieve regular visitors it's just not that many that want to visit him. He has multiple rooms, three I believe, and tv-games and all sorts.
As far as being incarcerated goes, he really is. But it's not one of those naked concrete cells you'll find in America.
Another thing to be concerned about with such options is that it opens up avenues to conclusions that wouldn't necessarily be possible otherwise. It's actually my concern with various alternatives to incarceration and types of parole and bond and what not, it sounds good in theory that if you don't have to incarcerate someone to say, restrict their access to computers (for someone who might be accused of tech crimes) or restrict access to work and home for home monitoring etc., but... it opens up a pathway to restricting rights more widely and there's less resistance to it because it's not seen as detrimental as incarceration. That isn't to say I oppose those options wholesale, I just approach them with healthy skepticism as a way to prevent being lulled into a false sense of security about them.
There are some countries where medically assisted suicide is available with conditions, and some states in the US where some options are available in limited circumstances, but in the US at least it's not widely available or an option in the vast majority of circumstances. Effectively that's what you're suggesting there. For the state, it could create sentencing or other incentives to increase the likelihood that someone would "choose" that route. For example, if you set a limit of 5 years before someone has that option, you might see the state find ways to increase sentences, say instead of 7 years its 10 years, and someone who would otherwise get 7 years would hit 5 years before the option is available and waiting 2 more years isn't as grim an outlook, but waiting 5 more years could be pressing. The state ends up saving money, they sentenced someone to more years but if they end up dead after 5, that erases costs for the years beyond the 5 they would have otherwise incurred.
I think you can't have that conversation without broadly including the basic right to die for everyone, you can't focus on people who are incarcerated for that. It's already a controversial subject for many, without hashing out the moral and ethical dilemmas there you can't escape those same dilemmas in the setting you're talking about. To focus it simply on those who are incarcerated could easily be seen as an attempt to evade those conversations because they're prisoners and less deserving of consideration of those dilemmas, and also kind of cowardly to provide it as an option if you're saying it's more humane, because it absolves the state of the ethics of killing someone. If you are going to stand on the grounds of it being more humane without being more broadly inclusive to the right to die concept to society as a whole, then IMO the state needs to make that determination rather than underhandedly leveraging it as "choice" onto unwitting "participants".
It's different because they don't exactly have the way to express choice to us, but we don't ask animals before we humanely put them down. We decide for them. Though in many cases, they're a living being effectively programmed to survive at all costs, so we don't need them to express it, it's very difficult for living beings to override that programming. If they were able to express a choice, they'd not choose death in the many cases where we administer it for humane reasons.
That's a good point. I wonder if that risk would materialise in practice, with the judges being so far removed from being affected by a person more or fewer imprisoned, but it's something to consider.
I think we kind of have that in the Netherlands: if you can demonstrate that your life, for whatever reason, is eternal suffering, you can have euthanasia. Mental issues such as PTSD are considered valid. Other countries idk, I'm not from there and I find it weird that you can't choose that option when you're demonstrably suffering with no outlook on any kind of relief. Currently living in Germany where that is essentially the case. Weird place. But anyway, also in NL a prisoner-for-life cannot just choose to exchange the prison sentence for a death sentence. They'd have to prove that they're suffering somehow. What I imagine doesn't count, is that you don't like your prison sentence for life and therefore want to end it. That's the thing I think could be added—at the inmate's express own wish and with a waiting period and all the checks and balances that are due there.
I'm guessing he's applying for something under domestic Norwegian law or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Is anyone able to say which right in particular he's trying to use?
When he successfully sued Norway in 2016, they ruled that authorities had broken Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Source: The Guardian
Just to clarify: although Breivik initially did partially win his lawsuit in district court, the state appealed and won in appeals court, and the Norwegian Supreme Court declined to hear Breivik's appeal.
The European Court of Human Rights also agreed with the appeals court that there was no violation of human rights (translated as "High Court" instead of "Appeals" in that link).
So Breivik has three cells to himself?
How the actual fuck did he managed that? That actually sounds really nice compared to what he would have received in the US, especially the state's that still have the death penalty on the books or even compared to the more liberal states.
Oh no...
anyway
Incarceration itself is inhumane and we should be actively looking for alternative solutions in most if not all cases.
I talked about it before: https://tildes.net/~tech/13ec/elizabeth_holmes_gets_more_than_eleven_years_for_theranos_scam#comment-7ku0
I largely agree but
From the bit I know about Breivik, he seems like a case where this would apply. That said, he may well have cleaned up his act instead of going deeper and deeper into Nazism given an approach that actually tried to rehabilitate him, we can't know. I sort of doubt it though.
There is nothing about what little is said about him that seems to have lessened his extreme point of views.
He said out loud that he wanted to either have people agree with him that the borders should be closed to foreigners (meaning "those people" - and we all know it's based on looks), or that the public would be so afraid of provoking more people like himself that they would close the borders to avoid more mass killings.
That was his rationale for the whole thing. Fear of having our culture destroyed by immigrants. The typical "I'm not a racist, just aware of how things really are" attempt at cleaning up your xenophobic views.
Seems kinda awkward for discussion to reply here but it seems less awkward than replying to that thread, so I'll go with here.
Having a rehabilitation focus first is a little short sighted IMO. I'm pretty critical of the US justice system and it's what I'm most familiar with so I can't speak to other countries, and I'm also pretty critical of people who have a punishment focused mindset, just to gave a baseline of where I'm coming from.
I think revenge is a very base feeling in humans, perhaps in other animals too but not sure that we'd ever have a way of knowing that, but ignoring that it is probably innate in all of us on some level would be like burying your head in the sand. Ideally we wouldn't necessarily feel that way, but ideally we also wouldn't be greedy or get angry or any of other negative feelings or thoughts people have but you can't simply ignore them or pretend like they will ever be totally eradicated. It's also not entirely an unjustified feeling, but how we act on it is what matters. In the same way, you wouldn't tell someone they shouldn't cry because something bad happened to them, their feelings of sadness are probably warranted and for many people it's a part of the process of dealing with something that happened to them. So it wouldn't be fair to just tell them to put a smile on their face and get over it. I'm stating this as it's important to incorporate this into any solutions or system that is set up.
If you become too-focused on rehabilitation, you lose sight of that basic human feeling. If someone does someone else wrong, the other person is possibly going to want revenge. Most systems generally want to prevent this from happening, so in place of this person taking it upon themselves to choose the revenge however they want, the system is stepping in and sort of determining it for them in a "fair" way. If your gold standard in any system is reducing crime, then reducing people's desire or need to take revenge has to be part of that, because revenge ends up being another crime.
Depending on how you view someone who takes revenge into their own hands, presumably you don't view it as psychopathic or not necessarily persistent disposition to crime and violence either. There's lots of people in the world that probably don't commit any crimes but might do something in an act of revenge, and once they get it, they're no longer a danger, so in this model you wouldn't have cause to imprison them and maybe you'd have cause to "rehabilitate" in the sense that you might try to get them into some kind of course or therapy or something, but beyond that, what else? Kinda seems like it's encouraging or enabling people to take revenge into their own hands.
The way to address that is complex and there's not one thing that is the sole solution. Part of it is simply providing better general education and life opportunities to people, not only because that reduces crime, but because it gives you the ability to expand minds and let people explore other ideas than just what feels natural. For example, someone who is dealing with anger issues can be taught ways to deal with anger, but it's much easier to give someone tools and resources to deal with anger if you've already got them to a good place in life. If you wait until they exhibit problems with anger before you bother giving them any education, it would be too late for many. In the same way, I think there's tools and resources people could be given to deal with the feelings of wanting revenge, which is of course partly anger but even more complex than just that feeling. You can't simply make it go away, just as I said about someone feeling sad or even to an extent someone feeling angry, the goal isn't to make people unfeeling, it's to help them better cope with those feelings in less destructive ways.
Another element to the solution could be something within restorative justice concepts. That won't work for every situation, but combined with other pieces it could be quite beneficial in many cases. There does need to be some caution with this obviously, as there's plenty of stories where some approaches that might fit under this definition end up being detrimental.
Additionally, incarceration in some ways can be viewed as protection from revenge, provided that incarceration is done humanely. Not that it would be the sole intent, but rather it serves as some form of "justice" which basically is the state enforcement of revenge, provides time for all parties to cool off, and provides protection to the community and to the individual who first committed a crime that might otherwise be a target for revenge. Balancing these factors and more together means it's not solely about one thing, meaning it would be a bit silly to simply incarcerate someone solely to protect them, but also understanding that they have violated their social responsibility or obligation so they forfeit some level of freedom temporarily at least until that situation can be mended.
But a lot of solutions to prison reform and overall reform of the justice system come down to improving society as a whole, it's very hard to focus just on prisons without creating perverse incentives. For example, in a rehabilitative focused system, you're generally suggesting services and support that aren't necessarily available to the general public. It's a bit of an oddity to have a system where you can get all the support and help you need to get better, but only after you've hurt someone else, rather than having such a system available prior to having hurt anyone else. One should simply be able to ask for help and achieve the same support that anyone in prison could get, right?
I'm a prison abolitionist, but Breivik's case is exactly how I think incarceration should be handled. Justice should focus on rehabilitation, except in cases where that isn't possible. Breivik has shown no remorse and would be very likely to cause additional harm if free. He is among the very few that should be quarantined from society. He's being kept in clean, safe, comfortable confinement, which is how we should treat those whose freedom must be restricted. He is one of the extremely few that should be incarcerated and his incarceration is how it should be done.
How horrible for the state to violate his human rights! Won't somebody get a violin for this poor man!
/s
Is it not a human right to be alive? How many humans' rights did he violate by murdering them?
The only visitors this man deserves are the families of his victims.
Lock him up even more, I say. Maybe even take away his windows and replace them with pictures of all the people he killed.