For decades, Sweden prided itself on embodying fairness, equality, and humanitarian compassion—a model welfare state and moral beacon to the world. Its courts were seen as guardians of justice and its asylum system as a triumph of civilized conscience. Yet today, those very institutions stand accused of betraying the people that they were created to protect. The case of Yazied Mohamed, an 18-year-old Eritrean refugee, who raped 15-year-old Meya Åberg in a pedestrian tunnel in Skellefteå, exposes this moral collapse with chilling clarity.
Mohamed was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Yet the Swedish Court of Appeal ruled that he should not be deported. It reasoned that the rape, which lasted “a few seconds to a few minutes”, because of its relatively short duration, was not “particularly serious”. That justification, as cold as it is bureaucratic, has provoked an outrage that transcends law and enters the realm of moral reckoning.
(For additional reading on this topic, see “Checking in on Sweden: When ejaculation during a rape happens quickly, the migrant gets to stay” by Olivia Murray.)
It is worth dwelling on the deeper meaning of that decision—not only its legal reasoning, but also what it reveals about a state and a judiciary that have lost their moral compass. Arguably, Sweden’s welfare state, once rooted in Christian-humanist ideals of duty, compassion, and justice, has decayed into a system that protects the abuser before the abused, defending imported barbarism in the name of tolerance while abandoning its own citizens—especially its women—to violence and humiliation.
Swedish deportation law, under the Aliens Act (Utlänningslagen), allows the expulsion of foreign nationals who commit crimes serious enough to threaten public order or safety. Yet deportation is not automatic: courts must consider “proportionality”, the offender’s “ties to Sweden”, and potential “human-rights violations upon return”. Refugees, under the 1951 UN Convention, are further protected from deportation to states where they risk persecution.
Legally, this framework appears rational. In practice, however, it has become a moral labyrinth in which justice fades into abstraction. In Mohamed’s case, the Court of Appeal acknowledged the rape but concluded it was not “particularly serious” because it was “brief”. This chilling reasoning reduces the horror of sexual violation to the stopwatch—as though a minute’s rape were a lesser evil than ten.
Here lies the heart of Sweden’s crisis: law has been severed from moral meaning. The Court’s obsession with temporal duration reflects a bureaucracy that has lost all intuitive sense of right and wrong. By measuring rape in minutes, it not only trivializes the victim’s trauma but also betrays the very idea of justice as moral truth.
From a feminist perspective, the ruling is a catastrophe. As scholars like Catharine MacKinnon have shown, patriarchal law has long minimized sexual violence by cloaking it in procedural neutrality. Sweden’s legal reasoning extends that blindness to absurdity. Whether the act lasted seconds or hours, the violation of a young girl’s body and dignity is absolute. To suggest otherwise is to deny her humanity.
Yet the betrayal runs deeper still. The Swedish state—which preaches “gender equality” as a national creed—has become complicit in the very subjugation of women that it claims to oppose. By refusing to expel a rapist from a culture, where women are treated as second-class beings, the judiciary effectively declares that Swedish women’s safety is secondary to the comfort of imported male aggressors
This is not compassion; it is “cowardice masquerading as virtue”. The welfare state that once defended the vulnerable now defends the violent. Its courts, social services, and political class have become a “machinery of moral abdication”—anxious not to appear “intolerant”, even as tolerance becomes complicity in barbarism.
Mohamed’s origin complicates the matter legally: under the “non-refoulement principle”, he cannot be deported to a country where he might face persecution. Eritrea’s repressive regime and indefinite conscription make deportation difficult. Yet this technical constraint has become an alibi for moral paralysis.
Sweden’s judiciary hides behind international law to justify outcomes that offend the conscience of ordinary citizens. The public sees what the legal elite refuses to acknowledge: that the humanitarian system now protects perpetrators at the expense of victims. When the law shields a rapist because his homeland is cruel, it converts compassion into absurdity.
Worse, this “legalistic piety” erodes public faith in the rule of law itself. When citizens watch their daughters violated by men from cultures that treat women as property—and then see those men defended by their own courts—the social contract fractures. Trust, the cornerstone of the welfare state, disintegrates.
Judges insist that they must apply the law, not public emotion. True—but law divorced from morality is tyranny by another name. As Ronald Dworkin argued, legal reasoning must be guided by moral principles, not mere textualism. The Court of Appeal’s sterile focus on the “briefness” of a rape betrays precisely this moral blindness.
The decision was, in a narrow sense, lawful. In a broader, more profound sense, however, it was unjust—and therefore illegitimate. When the law protects the aggressor and alienates the citizenry, it ceases to serve the common good. Sweden’s judiciary, once the conscience of the nation, now speaks in a dead moral language—one that prizes procedure over principle, abstraction over humanity.
Apart from a legal order, what is collapsing in Sweden is a moral civilization. The Swedish welfare state was built upon Christian-humanist values: that every person bears inherent dignity, that the strong must defend the weak, that justice must be tempered by compassion—not replaced by it.
In its zeal to prove its tolerance, however, Sweden has renounced discernment. The same state that once sought to elevate humanity now relativizes evil. It refuses to name barbarism for what it is, fearing that truth itself may offend. In protecting the cultural sensitivities of the abuser, it abandons the rights of the victim—and with them, the very foundations of moral law.
The ruling in the Mohamed-Åberg case thus symbolizes a broader spiritual decay: the collapse of a moral hierarchy that once recognized that some crimes—rape, violence against the innocent, contempt for women—stand out as offenses against civilization itself. When the state ceases to defend these boundaries, it ceases to be civilized.
The outrage following the ruling was immediate and widespread. Migration Minister Johan Forssell called it a “system error”. Across Sweden, citizens asked how a nation could protect a rapist yet fail a child. International observers, from conservative commentators to feminists, echoed the same question: Has Sweden’s humanitarianism become moral self-destruction?
The ruling has also deepened political polarization. The rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD)—long dismissed as populist—reflects both immigration concerns and a desperate plea for moral sanity. When liberal elites refuse to draw lines, populists will draw them instead. Thus, the Court’s attempt to uphold “proportionality” has only fueled the perception of a state more devoted to foreign criminals than to its own people.
Sweden’s legal framework must be reformed to reflect qualitative harm, not exclusively quantifiable factors like duration or physical injury. A rape is not measured in minutes but in the annihilation of trust, safety, and dignity. The law must recognize sexual violence as a civilizational crime—an assault on an individual and the moral order itself.
Statutory clarity is needed: the phrase “particularly serious crime” must explicitly encompass any act of sexual violence, especially against minors. Courts must be trained to understand trauma, power dynamics, and the symbolic weight of such crimes. Judicial independence should never mean moral indifference.
Sweden should rediscover the moral foundation of civilization. Compassion cannot mean blindness; tolerance cannot mean surrender. A welfare state refusing to protect its daughters from imported misogyny has lost the right to call itself humane.
The Mohamed-Åberg case goes beyond a legal scandal. It is the mirror in which Sweden confronts its own decay—a nation that built paradise and now trembles before its own conscience. The Court of Appeal’s decision was as much a misreading of law as a symptom of a deeper moral exhaustion: a post-Christian welfare state ashamed of defending itself, a judiciary terrified of moral judgment, a civilization alienated from its Judeo-Christian—and humanist—roots.
Whatever became of the social democratic “thousand-year empire”, the People’s Home (Folkhemmet)?
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