Anders Breivik Trial Displays Norway’s Formal Legal System
In a scene unimaginable in many countries, Norway’s worst mass killer since World War II gets to explain his fanatical views to the court and the world for days dressed up in a business suit.
Two days into Anders Behring Breivik’s terror trial, the studied formality with which Norway’s legal system deals with a confessed killer who rejects its authority is baffling to outsiders, even to some Norwegians.
The mass killer on trial in Norway defended his massacre in a statement he read at his trial Tuesday, declaring he’d do it again. A lay judge who’d suggested the death penalty for Anders Breivik was removed from the court panel.
On Monday, the day the trial started, Norwegian prosecutors and even lawyers representing the families of his 77 victims shook Breivik’s hand as proceedings began.
On Tuesday, the 33-year-old far-right militant was allowed to give an hour-long address to the court, reading from a statement that summarized the 1,500-page anti-Islamic manifesto that he posted online before his bomb-and-shooting rampage nine months ago.
“The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defense on behalf of my people, my city, my country,” Breivik declared, demanding to be found innocent of terror and murder charges.
He set off a bomb outside the government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight, then drove to Utoya island outside the capital and massacred 69 people in a shooting spree at the governing Labor Party’s youth summer camp on Utoya island. It was the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since World War II, he boasted.
The court’s main judge interrupted Breivik several times Tuesday, asking him to get to the point, but let him continue after he threatened that he would either finish his speech or not speak at all.
“It is critically important that I can explain the reason and the motive” for the massacre, said Breivik.
Breivik, who has admitted the attacks, said it doesn’t matter if he’s sent to prison, because living in a country ruled by “multiculturalists” was a prison in itself. The main point of his defense is to avoid an insanity ruling, which would deflate his political arguments.