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Odd stuff I find interesting in the Swedish legal system:
We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.
The Swedish "jury" (in district courts) consists of three lay judges appointed by the political parties (generally old people with nothing better to do). They can acquit the accused person if two of them disagree with the real judge, and convict if all three disagree. This almost never happens, so there's a longstanding debate to get rid of the entire system. It mostly results in somewhat regular scandals where the jury acquits people for really flimsy reasons when two of them happen to be ideologues or confused oddballs that never should have been appointed in the first place.
Defamation cases do not take the truth into account. It is e.g. illegal to write that somebody is a murderer if you're doing it to damage his reputation; that he actually happens to be recently convicted of first-degree murder is irrelevant. This absolutely gets weaponized by both the left and right; there's organizations on both sides of the culture war (e.g. "Näthatsgranskaren", "Förtalsombudsmannen"...) that specialize in more or less mass-reporting their enemies to the police when they see potentially "defamatory" stuff on the internet. It also had a pretty significant chilling effect around the time of the #metoo stuff, as women who wrote online about their experiences were slapped with significant fines if the person they wrote about was identifiable, regardless of the truth of the accusation.
Except for cases concerning freedom of expression, the government violating the constitution is not actually a crime and there is no official mechanism like having the supreme court address violations. The citizens are simply supposed to punish the government in the next general election.
How do they determine intent? In a ‘MeToo’ case the line between the primary intent being trying to damage someone’s reputation and to report on an unpleasant experience is surely fine.
Presumably if one could have reported the experience without naming the perpetrator (or making it obvious who it was), but chose not to.
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