Every other basic right, such as the Formation of Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On this law democracy stands or falls.
All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the R.F.S. are set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (F.P.). This defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to publish child pornography and the depiction of certain violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or exhort someone to crime. It is forbidden to defame or slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the persecution of an ethnic group.
Press freedom has also been enshrined by parliament and is based on the socially and democratically acceptable restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of the legislation has it that no person has the right to harass or humiliate another person.
Since R.F.S. and F. P. are laws, some sort of authority is needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.
The first is the office of the Prosecutor General, assigned to prosecute crimes against F. P. This did not please Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the Prosecutor General was too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view, direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The Prosecutor General usually replied that the principle of democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This attitude, however, had come under question more and more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hårdh, the general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, had submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor General's want of initiative over a number of years. The report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and convict anyone under the law of persecution against an ethnic group.
The second institution was the Security Police division for Constitutional Protection, and Superintendent Edklinth took on this responsibility with the utmost seriousness. He thought that it was the most important post a Swedish policeman could hold, and he would not exchange his appointment for any other position in the entire Swedish legal system or police force. He was the only policeman in Sweden whose official job description was to function as a political police officer. It was a delicate task requiring great wisdom and judicial restraint, since experience from far too many countries has shown that a political police department could easily transform itself into the principal threat to democracy.
The media and the public assumed for the most part that the main function of the Constitutional Protection Unit was to keep track of Nazis and militant vegans. These types of group did attract interest from the Constitutional Protection Unit, but a great many institutions and phenomena also fell within the bailiwick of the division. If the king, for example, or the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took it into their hearts that parliamentary government had outlived its role and that parliament should be replaced by a dictatorship, the king or the commander-in-chief would very swiftly come under observation by the Constitutional Protection Unit. Or, to give a second example, if a group of police officers decided to stretch the laws so that an individual's constitutionally guaranteed rights were infringed, then it was the Constitutional Protection Unit's duty to react. In such serious instances the investigation was also assumed to come under the authority of the Prosecutor General.
The problem, of course, was that the Constitutional Protection Unit had only an analytical and investigative function, and no operations arm. That was why it was generally either the regular police or other divisions within the Security Police who stepped in when Nazis were to be arrested.
In Edklinth's opinion, this state of affairs was deeply unsatisfactory. Almost every democratic country maintains an independent constitutional court in some form, with a mandate to see to it that authorities do not ride roughshod over the democratic process. In Sweden the task is that of the Prosecutor General or the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who, however, can only pursue recommendations forwarded to them by other departments. If Sweden had a constitutional court, then Salander's lawyer could instantly charge the Swedish government with violation of her constitutional rights. The court could then order all the documents on the table and summon anyone it