Dealing with a rogue regime is not a pleasant task
Oisin Cantwell
News columnist
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.
Published 16.49
The anger that Sweden has released an Iranian executioner is understandable.
But the prisoner exchange is morally reasonable.
After months of speculation and discreet diplomatic cow-trafficking at the highest level, Reuters news agency revealed today that it is done.
The Swedish citizens Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi are sitting on a plane on their way to Stockholm.
In return, the lifer Hamid Noury has been released from prison in Sweden and is now on his way to Tehran.
This operation raises questions that are likely to be answered in the coming days, but it also contains aspects that are likely to remain obscure for a long time to come.
But it is already possible to reason about the difficult moral balances that have been made.
There is no doubt that Hamid Noury is a rare repulsive person.
He played an important role in the mass executions of political prisoners in the Iranian prison Gohardasht in 1988 and was sentenced on good grounds to life imprisonment in two Swedish courts for a significant number of murders as well as for gross violations of international law.
The fact that such a figure regains his freedom within just one year of the Court of Appeal verdict is of course very offensive to some.
It is not difficult to understand that the exiled Iranians, many of them with relatives who were murdered in prison, are despairing and filled with anger.
Criticism is already being heard that the Swedish rule of law is being undermined, criticism which is in no way unreasonable.
But the fact that Noury is on his way home does not mean that the multi-year Swedish police investigation and the two processes were done unnecessarily.
On the contrary, the final judgment is a historical document, the first of its kind in the Western world, about a dark era in Iran's history.
It is also an important signal to various mass murderers and war criminals on the loose around the world: you are not safe, the truth and justice can catch up with you.
A warning that even those who find themselves in the conflicts of our time should take seriously.
Now this is not the only aspect to consider in this story.
There are also people other than the family members of the executed to take into account. The Swedish citizens who are stuck in Iranian prisons.
33-year-old EU diplomat Johan Floderus was arrested in Iran in April 2022. Since then, he has been imprisoned, at risk of being sentenced to death on what appear to be baseless charges of espionage.
Swedish-Iranian Saeed Azizi was arrested last November in his home in Iran and sentenced to five years in prison.
The sentence has been described as part of Tehran's hostage diplomacy, which there is no reason to doubt.
The Swedish state has an obligation to assist citizens who find themselves in difficulties abroad, and these two men and their families have been subjected to a suffering that to an outsider cannot be fully understood.
Their situation must also be seen in the light of the fact that the Swedish-Iranian citizen Habib Chaab was executed in May last year.
The passivity in the Raoul Wallenberg case is still an open wound in Swedish diplomacy.
Now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has succeeded in bringing about the same kind of operation that some other countries in the Western world have carried out in recent years.
The lives of one's own country's citizens have been considered more important than Tehran receiving receipts that kidnappings pay off.
The balance is not easy, but I think that those who say that Sweden and other countries are doing wrong find it difficult to look the loved ones of the imprisoned people in the eyes.
Dealing with a rogue is no pleasant task, but sometimes the alternative is worse.
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