The Supreme Court has delivered several judgments that entail restrictions on freedom of expression online; indeed, pre-trial detention is being used as a form of prior restraint, in order to prevent an expression from being made. This is an entirely new judicial practice, and it was recently applied in Hålogaland District Court, where a man was placed in pre-trial detention for two weeks in order to prevent him from expressing himself. Since he was due to appear in another case anyway, the court reasoned that he might as well remain in custody.
That is how casually the district court treats the use of imprisonment as prior restraint.
Such a cavalier use of pre-trial detention represents a dangerous drift that may have serious consequences. Is the gravity of imprisoning people for their opinions beginning to disappear?
By definition, it is prior restraint if a judge locks someone up so that they cannot communicate.
We have never had such a judicial practice in this country.
He was imprisoned for something hypothetical – what he might come to say and how it might affect others.
Ordinarily, censorship concerns something one has said or written. Here it is applied to something imaginary: what the person might come to write and how it might inspire others.
We have entered entirely new territory, but it is consistent with what we have heard in recent years: words are actions, and from there it is not far to thoughtcrime. People used to laugh at such ideas when Orwell and 1984 were fashionable. No one is laughing any longer. It has become reality, and those who take action and imprison people are not receptive to criticism.
This is one piece of evidence that we have crossed a boundary: what once stood as immovable principles – that you could be convicted only for something you had done that violated the law – has been replaced by something you might come to say and, even more speculatively, the effect of those words on an imagined audience.
It is hardly a coincidence that we see the same thing in Germany, where people are convicted for calling Friedrich Merz “Pinocchio”, and where people are denied entry to the United Kingdom for criticising Keir Starmer and British censorship.
We have entered a new landscape, and it has been created and is governed by a regime.
The United States as a Warning
Those who have followed Obama’s manoeuvres against Trump and Biden’s lawfare will have an advantage. It is this deep state that has now arrived in Europe, where our roots are far deeper and darker than those of the United States. The Americans have managed to reclaim freedom of expression. In Europe, the outlook is grim.
One significant feature of the emergence of the new regime is the cultivation of suspicion.
Trump has been used not merely as a whipping boy, but as a bogeyman onto whom anything can be projected. Journalists long ago lost track of the facts and the historical record, not to mention contact with real life.
When Anders Giæver writes of the Shada case that it may be the greatest conspiracy story of all time, he is borrowing notions from Biden’s FBI and Department of Justice.
Some have perfected a method, and if one wishes to preserve the autonomy of politics and public debate, one must understand the codes and recognise them. Otherwise, one will be overwhelmed.
The pre-trial detention in Bergen did not come out of the blue.
Anine Kierulf and others know this. Patrick Løkken discusses the new practice in an article in Advokatbladet. It is symptomatic of the fragmentation of the Norwegian public sphere that such an important debate is taking place in a professional journal rather than in the daily press.
On 15 May, the Supreme Court’s Appeals Selection Committee considered a case in which the police sought detention on the grounds of a risk of repetition.
A was arrested on 6 May 2026 and charged with violation of privacy, cf. Section 267 of the Penal Code, and the sharing of offensive images, etc., cf. Section 267a, first paragraph, of the Penal Code. (3) The factual basis for the charge concerns the publication of a number of videos on A’s social media accounts. In the videos, A allegedly claimed, among other things, that her grandchild had been subjected to sexual abuse by his father and grandfather. She also allegedly played audio recordings of her grandchild’s caseworkers in the child welfare service discussing the child’s treatment and displayed a journal entry identifying the grandchild by name.
The charge in the present case concerns new videos published between July 2025 and May 2026. (5) The prosecution requested that A be remanded in custody for four weeks. The detention was justified by the risk of repetition. (6) On 7 May 2026, Salten and Lofoten District Court issued a ruling releasing A. The district court held that there was insufficient risk of repetition. (7) The prosecution appealed the ruling, and the appeal was granted suspensive effect.
Thus, it is the police who wish to use pre-trial detention to prevent expressions on social media that they find offensive to the injured party. Typically, these cases concern children and suspicions of abuse.
It is not easy for the courts to cut through and determine the truth. Should the police be allowed to imprison people in order to silence them?
Everyone knows monomaniacs online who obsessively pursue their causes. Most are harmless, but some are unpleasant. Having one’s family life publicly exposed is certainly unpleasant and may harm children.
The Supreme Court has, however, required that the courts carry out a balancing of interests. There are competing considerations.
One may be the political class’s need not to be publicly exposed. Douglas Murray recently described the political class in Britain as criminal. It knows very well what it is doing. Immigration and violence are not side effects; they are the result of a deliberate policy pursued over time.
Should he be imprisoned? It may be argued that he could inspire someone to act. Should he be held responsible?
Such associative speculations and accusations have circulated in Norway for a long time and were seriously propagated after 22 July.
Who is to decide what constitutes a legitimate allegation on behalf of an injured party, where publication may force the truth into the open, and what constitutes malicious defamation?
Social media opens many Pandora’s boxes. The most effective filtering mechanism may be rapid circulation itself: let the public respond. It is usually the public that provides a sense of what is true and what is not. The police are ill-suited to such a role, and they have become so politicised that they are in danger of losing the public’s trust.
They are polarising.
The free internet is our last line of defence. If it falls, little will remain to distinguish us from an authoritarian system that manipulates freedom of expression and habeas corpus at will.
Habeas corpus is Latin and translates directly as “you shall have your body”, or more precisely “you shall retain control over your own body”, meaning “you shall retain your liberty”. These two words introduced a series of writs, procedural formulas issued by the Lord Chancellor on behalf of the King. Common to all these formulas was that, for various purposes, they required an authority to bring an arrested person before a court within a specified period after arrest. The purpose was to prevent arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
It is uncertain when the writ of habeas corpus originated, but the principle found expression in the Magna Carta (1215), which guaranteed all free men protection against unlawful imprisonment.
The best-known form is Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, a writ used in England for the purpose of examining the legal basis for detention. This formula gave its name to the Habeas Corpus Act.
In modern times, provisions corresponding to the writ of habeas corpus exist in the United States Constitution and a number of other constitutions.
Pre-trial detention as a preventive measure against online speech