The verdict by a Swedish court may pave the way for more controversial burnings of the Muslim holy book Quran. A Swedish appeals court on Monday said police had no legal grounds to block two gatherings where protesters had planned to burn copies of the Quran earlier this year.
The burning of Islam’s holy book outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm in January sparked outrage in the Muslim world, leading to weeks of protests, calls for a boycott of Swedish goods and further stalled Sweden’s NATO membership bid. Following that incident, police refused to authorize two other requests, one by a private individual and one by an organization, to hold Quran burnings outside the Turkish and Iraqi Embassies in Stockholm in February. Police argued the January protest had made Sweden “a higher priority target for attacks.”
Following appeals from both protest organizers, the Stockholm Administrative Court overturned the decisions, saying the cited security concerns were not enough to limit the right to demonstrate. But Stockholm police, in turn, appealed the rulings to the appeals court, which on Monday sided with the lower administrative court.
In both rulings, on the two separate applications, the appeals court said “the order and security problems” referenced by the police did not have “a sufficiently clear connection to the planned event or its immediate vicinity.” It added that the ruling could be appealed to Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court.
Swedish police had authorized the January protest organized by Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish far-right provocateur who has already been convicted of racist abuse. Paludan also provoked rioting in Sweden last year when he visited the country and publicly burned copies of Islam’s holy book.
The January Quran burning also damaged Sweden’s relations with Türkiye, which was particularly offensive given that police had authorized the demonstration and provided the perpetrator with police protection.
Moreover, Stockholm’s failure to crack down on terrorist groups, namely the PKK, who targets Türkiye, has already caused Ankara to block Sweden’s NATO bid.
“It is clear that those who caused such a disgrace in front of our country’s embassy can no longer expect any benevolence from us regarding their application for NATO membership,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in January. Swedish politicians have criticized the Quran burnings but claimed the burnings are a right to "freedom of expression" despite Europe's history of pre-World War II book burnings by right-wing extremists in Germany.
A trilateral meeting between Turkish, Swedish and NATO officials will be held on Tuesday in the capital Ankara for the Nordic country’s NATO accession bid.
