The Norwegian public sphere is today sustained by a group of independent individuals within various fields of expertise. The child welfare service (Barnevernet) is one of them. The child welfare service is at the centre of legal protection in this country. If we do not care about children, what kind of society do we have?

British report: 250,000 white British girls systematically raped by Pakistani Muslim gangs

When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Tore Schei, who was a major investor in, among other things, property, retired at the age of 70 in 2016, he joined forces with the son-in-law of his predecessor, Carsten Smith, namely Frode Elgesem, then a lawyer at Thommessen.

They received a pile of millions from public funds via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UD), in order to secure human rights in, among other places, Africa! So noble, virtuous and considerate, supposedly? At last Africans were to be rescued from the yoke by some exceedingly worthy top lawyers from Oslo’s affluent west end.

They were to do this through what they referred to as a “law boutique” in a company they called ILPI Law, following a remarkably similar model and name to the long-standing favourite of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Terje Rød-Larsen and his company “IPI”.

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. The project was exposed, and VG’s Hanne Skartveit wrote that “the K-word is moving ever closer”. Nothing came of the ILPI adventure after that.

After a couple of years in disgrace, the Solberg Government decided to be remarkably kind to Elgesem in particular. It is scarcely believable, but under Progress Party politician Tor Mikkel Wara as Minister of Justice, they gave him, of all people, a judicial appointment in the Borgarting Court of Appeal – in competition with a great many highly qualified applicants. People who, for example, had NOT received million-kroner transfers from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an extremely dubious project had also applied, but did not succeed.

The appointment of judges is, of course, politics in practice, and “someone” must have believed that Elgesem possessed precisely the attitudes and qualifications that people with power require. Borgarting is, after all, by far the country’s largest court of appeal, where nearly all major financial legal cases are heard.

And it was indeed he, Court of Appeal Judge Frode Elgesem, who disregarded conflict-of-interest rules and accepted a paid assignment as chairman of the Wergeland Centre – which stands for democracy and human rights – when his friend, Minister Tonje Brenna, had an assignment available.

When that case collapsed in the media in 2023 – the press does occasionally do its job, at least parts of it – little Frode (62) hid behind Tonje’s (35) skirts. And the press? They pretended that she was the greater villain. Yet he was the lawyer. A long-standing corporate lawyer and now a Court of Appeal judge.

Could he not have said to his friend: “Dear Tonje, I am honoured, and you know I think it is nice to earn easy money from human rights, and I am still somewhat annoyed that the stroke of genius that was ILPI came to nothing, but our friendship renders me disqualified. You as well, by the way. You know, I am actually a lawyer. So I know a little about conflicts of interest, even though people like us usually place ourselves above such things. Besides, I am paid by the public to serve as a judge in the country’s largest court of appeal and… strictly speaking, I ought to pretend that this is a position and role that I take seriously enough to prioritise helping to clear the backlog in the courts. So, thank you very much for the offer, but I must unfortunately decline.”

He did not say that. Instead, he accepted the assignment. Many Norwegian judges engage in a great deal of other work on the side.

Conflicts of interest and secrecy are important keywords within the Norwegian administration of justice, but as we hear from the conversation between Marie Golimo Kingsrød (VG), Silje Frøsund (Faktisk), and Snakk med Silje, they are nowhere near understanding this.

Norway therefore has well-paid judges who use ordinary working hours for other paid secondary activities, which is another scandal within the scandal.

We also have many civilian employees in the Courts Administration and in the courts who do not perform meaningful work. Money could easily be saved there and used instead to secure the legal protection of ordinary people.

Judges also undertake costly trips. Oddly enough, Frode Elgesem travelled to Poland in 2020, supposedly to secure the legal protection of Poles.

The Trude Strand Lobben Case

In 2018, several dozen judges travelled to Strasbourg. There they were to observe and applaud Government Attorney Fredrik Sejersted’s victorious performance in proceedings against the mother of three, Trude Strand Lobben, before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The background was that she had wrongfully been deprived of her baby by the child welfare service ten years earlier, which Sejersted claimed had been the correct decision.

What this meaningless luxury gathering in Strasbourg cost the public is unknown, but one could probably have purchased audio recorders from Clas Ohlson for every courtroom in the country and still had money left for buns and soft drinks to celebrate the occasion. “Norway has acquired audio-recording equipment. Cheers!” That would have been something…

Trude Strand Lobben, incidentally, won in Strasbourg, and the cocky Sejersted was severely rebuked. On 10 September 2019, the Norwegian State suffered the most humiliating defeat in its history in a child welfare case. It must have been a peculiar experience for the judges sitting in the public gallery.

The hearing, incidentally, remains openly available online.

They actually have audio and video recording equipment in France!

Most people, including the “investigative journalists” Kingsrød and Frøsund, probably do not know this. The loyal, editor-controlled Norwegian press does not write about such things. That is why it is important to consult several sources when reading newspapers and watching television news.

“What are journalists supposed to scrutinise? They report from court cases all the time,” writes a woman in Silje Schjevig’s comments section.

The answer is no. They do not. Journalists are stacked on top of one another in celebrity cases involving Anders Behring Breivik, Eirik Jensen, Laila Bertheussen, Gjert Ingebrigtsen and Marius Borg Høiby. The large press presence leads uninformed people to believe that the legal protection of “you, me, and all other ordinary people” is also well safeguarded. But it is not.

This is what makes the situation so serious. Why, for example, does the Norwegian Institution for Human Rights (NIM) do nothing? Since its establishment in 2015, its task has been to safeguard the human rights of ordinary people in Norway. I have never seen it on the barricades defending the legal protection of ordinary people. They can always send an articulate and talkative lawyer to Dagsnytt Atten from time to time, but it is as though they live in a parallel world.

In the overwhelming majority of court cases, the public gallery is empty, and certainly devoid of journalists. There were probably no journalists present during the criminal case against the parents of Shada and her brothers. Nor were any audio recordings made. Consequently, there may be much that we do not know, and which VG/Faktisk may not necessarily know either.

In 2023 and 2024, a major rape case was heard before the Oslo District Court and the Borgarting Court of Appeal. A child welfare entrepreneur with an extremely powerful network was charged with the rape of a young man, as well as his own former foster son.

VG assigned some of its genuinely skilled investigative journalists to cover the case. They did a good job. However, when it came before the courts, first in the Oslo District Court, Gard Steiro decided that VG should stop writing about it. “Mysterious” would be the operative word. The case had the potential to turn Norway’s self-image upside down and would also have exposed several celebrity lawyers with whom the man later convicted of rape had collaborated.

The case had become “too big to fail” for editor-controlled media. Therefore, it was suddenly suppressed. At any rate, that is the most plausible and indeed the only explanation I have found. Shortly afterwards, VG engaged its journalist Marie Golimo Kingsrød to attack people who criticise the child welfare service. It is difficult not to see these events as connected.

I was in court. Every day for a total of two months. The public gallery was almost empty. Someone from NRK attended for a couple of days. VG for about an hour. The court also made no audio recordings, but the prosecution did so on its own initiative. That is good! There is a great deal there that would make good material for journalists. And note: the foster father was convicted.

Incidentally, I noticed that Kingsrød did not even mention the “foster father” when she sought to justify the claim that VG has also been critical of the child welfare service (cf. “Snakk med Silje”). I find it difficult to believe that this was accidental.

Norway differs from the United States, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, England, the Czech Republic, Poland, Iceland, Finland, Lithuania, and probably also civilised countries in Asia and Africa, in that it does NOT secure evidence of what occurs and is said during main hearings. It also happens that judges “lose” documents, supposedly. They do not really do so, but they pretend to. Miscarriages of justice are carried out, and trusting, system-loyal journalists who believe they are always reading the truth when they read a judgment do not know what may actually have happened.

Many, perhaps most, people believe they know the Norwegian legal system. They believe it is safe in the sense that conflicts of interest and match-fixing do not occur. An ignorant woman asks Silje Schevig whether she should begin scrutinising Schevig’s own field to see whether mistakes are made there. (That is, psychology.) The ignorant woman is probably not the right person, but honest journalists should most certainly scrutinise, for example, expert psychologists in child welfare cases.

They do not do that either. The BBC, however, did. In 2018 it produced a documentary entitled “Norway’s Silent Scandal”.

It concerns something as commonplace as abuse within the child welfare service, and I would remind readers that Shada also stated that she was raped by a male employee at the institution where she was forced to live when she was 14 years old. She quite clearly did not receive the help she needed, not even afterwards.

Rape and abuse against children in the care of the child welfare service ARE common. In Norway. The well-known sexologist and psychologist Thore Langfeldt says to BBC journalist Tim Hewell, who points out that scrutiny of the child welfare service would trigger a large number of compensation claims: “…the system would collapse, I think. They wouldn’t be able to handle it… so, it’s better to… sometimes let the sleeping dog sleep.”

But the sleeping dog has slept long enough now, has it not? Everyone concerned with children’s legal protection and the best interests of children should at the very least acquaint themselves with reality sufficiently to watch this BBC documentary.

I hope everyone who has not seen “Norway’s Silent Scandal” will do so now.