Sweden – Dagens Nyheter, July 25, 2025
Journalist Dawit Isaak has been imprisoned in Eritrea for 24 years. Yet Swedish prosecutors refuse to investigate the country’s extensive human rights violations. This passivity is an embarrassment for Sweden, write Reporters Without Borders and Swedish PEN.
Sweden doesn’t seem to be listening — and the Prosecutor’s Office appears completely deaf when it comes to the case of Dawit Isaak.
In June, UN Special Rapporteur on Eritrea, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, presented yet another damning report in Geneva. Just like his predecessors, he urges all states to investigate Eritrea’s widespread human rights abuses.
This is a responsibility shared by all countries. And it’s precisely this kind of responsibility that Sweden took in the case of Hamid Noury, the Iranian executioner convicted in a Swedish court for his role in the mass executions in Iran during the 1980s. Noury was later exchanged for Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi. Sweden has also prosecuted crimes committed by the so-called Islamic State. Neither Iran nor ISIS cooperates with investigations, and Swedish prosecutors have not been able to access the crime scenes — but that has not stopped them.
Yet when it comes to Eritrea and Dawit Isaak, the Prosecutor’s Office suddenly claims complete helplessness.
They won’t even try. After the latest complaint was filed in 2020 — with the support of leading international jurists — the Prosecutor’s Office said an investigation was impossible since Eritrea wouldn’t cooperate. Yet the crimes concern a Swedish citizen, Dawit Isaak, who has never been charged but has been held captive by the Eritrean regime for nearly a quarter of a century.
The UN Special Rapporteur writes: “Thousands of victims of arbitrary detention continue to be imprisoned under harsh and often life-threatening conditions.” The situation is critical, he states, and all countries should “exert maximum pressure on the Eritrean government” to stop the systematic crimes.
Ten years ago, Dawit Isaak’s lawyers filed a complaint against Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki and several of his men for crimes against humanity. Back then, the Prosecutor General (RÅ) believed there was reason to suspect crimes and that the matter deserved investigation. The only reason he refrained was because an investigation could interfere with the Foreign Ministry’s (UD) diplomatic efforts to secure Isaak’s release. So he held back.
