Published 30 December 2022 at 10.29
Media. The Supreme Court rules that Samnytt's responsible publisher Mats Dagerlind must be sentenced for gross defamation by a journalist at Dagens Nyheter who was portrayed as a jihadist. Now the site is forced to pay approximately SEK 300,000.
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It was in an article in September 2020 that Samnytt singled out DN journalist Saeed Alnahhal as a “suspected jihadist”.
Alnahhal came to Sweden from Syria during the asylum chaos in 2015. According to the article had he enjoyed the “protection and favor” of Muslim terrorist organizations in his home country.
Mats Dagerlind has previously been convicted by the District Court and the Court of Appeal for the publication.
The Supreme Court has concluded that the information in the article about an association between Saeed Alnahhal and two terrorist groups was apt to expose him to the contempt of others. It was therefore a question of information that is defamatory, according to the court.
“It is in and of itself justifiable to publish information that a journalist in a major daily newspaper has connections to terrorist organizations. Such circumstances can have a major impact on the public's ability to assess his or her credibility as a journalist and value his or her texts. A prerequisite for freedom from liability is, however, that it can be shown that the information is true or that there was a reasonable basis for it”,
writes HD and continues:
“In this case there was no support that the information was true and it was also not shown that the online newspaper had a reasonable basis for the data.”
DN's editor-in-chief Peter Wolodarski comments on the HD verdict on his newspaper's website:
– It is an important judgment that says two things. Partly, that Samnytt's information was baseless, and that is why Mats Dagerlind is convicted of gross defamation. In part, the court says that it would have been justified in principle to publish this information if it had been true. But now it was about lies and for that reason it is important that Samnytt's responsible publisher is held accountable for this.
According to Wolodarski, it will now be more difficult for “this type of media to do something similar again”.
Mats Dagerlind writes in an editorial on Samnytt that it is a “politicized judgment with serious consequences”.
“The judgment that must be perceived as politicized can by being prejudicial have far consequences for the freedom of the press in Sweden, in particular for investigative journalism around migration and Islamism – topics with a prominent place in the public conversation. This conversation now risks being further distorted when critical voices are criminalized,” he writes.
In summary According to Dagerlind, Samnytt's costs related to the defamation suit are in the order of SEK 300,000. DN's legal costs make up the dominant part of that sum.