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14 Dec, 2013 14:28

‘It’s torture’: Mother of Pirate Bay co-founder slams Danish prison conditions

The mother of jailed Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has lashed out at the Danish prison system for the conditions her son is being kept in, calling them “torture.” Svartholm Warg has been jailed in Denmark on hacking charges since November.

Svartholm Warg, 29, was extradited from Sweden to Denmark, where he has since been kept in solitary confinement. He has not been allowed so much as a book to read, much less the opportunity to communicate with other inmates or use a computer.

This has been his plight since he lost an appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court, following allegations that he hacked servers belonging to a Danish public record IT company.

The Pirate Bay co-founder’s mother, Kristina Svartholm Warg, told RT that she didn’t like what she saw when she visited her son in detention.

“They haven’t allowed him to keep anything in his cell from his books that he brought from Sweden, no magazines and that type of thing,”
she said. “And being in isolation like that, just with Danish TV to look at, nothing else to do, I mean it’s not good for any person to be like that.”

In an interview with Sweden’s The Local, she described her son’s prison conditions as “torture.”

Lawyers have not found any legal reasons for putting Svartholm Warg in solitary confinement, as the Danish court never orders such measures, the woman said.

Kristina Svartholm Warg

"According to what the prosecutor said to the media…she said that ‘I never made such a decision.’ So it’s difficult to find out who made this decision, and since you don’t know who made the decision you can’t complain properly about it," she told RT.

Kristina Svartholm Warg added that her son’s earlier acquittal for allegedly hacking Nordea Bank in September had gone through in Sweden and “the intrusion that he’s accused of in Denmark is very similar to the intrusion he was accused of in Sweden a year ago.”

“The main problem is that the Danish authorities…don’t care about the Swedish Appeals Court decision,” the woman said.

She personally has no doubts about her son being not guilty, and revealed that Svartholm Warg told her that even “the Danish police claim that he’s innocent.”

“The claims they make aren’t public yet, but he has told me about them,” the woman said.

Svartholm Warg’s mother has urged Danish authorities to bring her son to court as “as soon as ever possible,” accusing local law enforcement officials of being deliberately sluggish.

“The Danish police have had…I think, it’s ten months now for investigating the things after they got tipped by the Swedish police. And they haven’t come far into that process,”
she explained. “I think they work so slowly…I can’t understand why, unless it’s that they want to keep him in those bad conditions.”

That sentiment was echoed by the computer wizard’s lawyer, Luise Hoj, who earlier shared her opinion that Svartholm Warg’s solitary confinement is all down to a decision made by the Danish prison service.

The Pirate Bay co-founder was secretly moved from a prison in central Copenhagen to one on the outskirts of the city.

Svartholm Warg’s lawyer remains puzzled as to how the treatment could change so radically from Sweden to Denmark, especially when the cases are so strikingly similar.

But the attorney remains optimistic about the upcoming court proceedings, believing that Svartholm Warg will not be prosecuted for the alleged hacking of the IT firm, as the case is similar in nature to the Nordea hacking charges.

“He was not convicted of hacking Nordea… and I think the material is somewhat the same in the Danish case. So I expect him not to be convicted of anything in Denmark,”
she told RT.

However, one major quirk of the legal system remains, and that is Hoj’s powerlessness to do anything about Svartholm Warg’s current conditions. She is also unable to inform Svartholm Warg’s mother on how much longer he will be kept in solitary confinement.

“Now, because it’s a decision made by the prison service [not the judge], I can make a complaint, but I can’t give any deadlines,” she told RT.

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