Hemliga tvångsmedel: Utökad tillämpning av hemliga tvångsmedel - vägen ut ur tystnadskulturen?

Sammanfattning: Covert coercive measures include, among other, covert surveillance and eavesdropping of electronic communications, CCTV, room tapping, and data interception. Coercive measures are regulated in the Code of Judicial Procedure and used by law enforcement agencies to facilitate their investigative work. In the autumn of 2019, the Swedish government presented a 34-point program with measures to curb gang crime. One of the proposals is to expand the possibilities for criminal investigation authorities to use secret coercive measures to overcome the code of silence that prevails in criminal gangs. The code of silence means that witnesses and victims of crime often do not dare to testify or report crimes, which makes crimes difficult to investigate. To counteract the problem the Swedish government proposed that more crimes be included in the so-called Crime Catalog, which can be used for covert eavesdropping and secret surveillance of electronic communications. The Crime Catalog makes it possible to use covert coercive measures on certain crimes that do not meet the requirements of the Code of Judicial Procedure, as they are considered too subversive or difficult to investigate that covert coercive measures in these cases are an important tool in law enforcement. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the proposal as laid out by the Swedish government and further investigate whether an increase in covert coercive measures is justifiable; given the potential damage to the right to privacy that such measures might entail. These initial questions will be investigated with the help of the legal dogmatic method. Covert coercive measures have been used for a long time and the area is constantly changing. Regulatory changes are often complex due to a conflict of interests between improving law enforcement and issues concerning right to privacy. The starting point of the thesis is therefore this conflict of interests, but also in the legal security aspects and principles that exist in the research space. After an examination of the current law in the field and a comparison with the new proposal, the thesis finds that the proposal presented by the Swedish government is reasonable based on the balances of interests made by previous legislation.