374 which were considered to have constituted attempts to incite revolutionary anti-parliamentarian acts such as hanging the county sheriff, murdering the King and refusing to do compulsory military service. 2.3. The so-calledStaaffActs of 1906 During the first decade of the 1900s, the revolutionary, often syndicalistically inclined, socialists formed a so-called “young socialists” faction. The young socialists wanted to encourage Swedish workers to feel more solidarity with workers in other countries than with the ruling social classes in Sweden and therefore refuse to do compulsory military service. In 1906, Sweden’s first clearly liberal government, Karl Staaff’s first administration, presented a number of legislative proposals aimed at counteracting the occurrence of, inter alia, anti-military propaganda. This legislation, the so-called Staaff Acts, was fought against not only by the social democrats but also by many of Karl Staaff’s own party colleagues in the Liberal Party (Liberala samlingspartiet). Nonetheless, the legislative proposal was accepted by both chambers of the Riksdag. The so-called Staaff Acts meant that it became possible to prohibit members of the armed forces fromattending meetings at which it might be assumed that anti-military propaganda would be presented and that the description of the offences contained in the Sedition Act was extended so that even indirect attempts to entice the commission of crime by, for example, praising criminal action, were expressly criminalized. Furthermore, the maximum punishment under Chapter 10, Section 14, CLAwas raised fromtwo years’ imprisonment to four years’ penal labour in cases concerning sedition. The penal provisions against incitement to rebellion were repealed in 1906 as being unnecessary, since acts of this kind were covered by the Sedition Act. Those parts of the Staaff Acts which related to freedom of the press were finally passed in 1909. The provisions of Section 3, item 7, FPA, which had remained unamended since 1888, thus became worded consistently with the 1906 version of the Sedition Act. Furthermore, it became possible to seize anti-military material found with troops or on board naval vessels, irrespective of whether the written material was criminal or not. In contrast to the extension of the Sedition Act in 1889, the legislation of 1906 and 1909 appears to have affected the revolutionary factions’ freedom of expression to a comparatively great extent. The fact that significantly more persons were sentenced under the so-called Gagging Acts during the years 1906 to 1921 than during the years 1887 to 1906 may be the result of the intensification of revolutionary anti-military propaganda during the first decade of the 1900s. Afurther explanation for the increase in the number of prosecutions may be that the legislation of 1906 aroused the interest of the police in the occurrence of anti-social agitation. Furthermore, the increase in the scale of pen-
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