380 7. Briefly on the freedomof political expression in Denmark and Norway The penal provisions relating to defamation of a foreign power, the King, the Riksdag and public officials appear on the theoretical level to have limited the political right to criticize in a rather uniformmanner in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. As regards anti-parliamentary propaganda, that is, hostile to the constitutional situation, the Swedish legislation on sedition had a counterpart in the Danish Criminal Law Act provision against endeavouring to promote or by other means cause high treasonous rebellion. The Norwegian Criminal Law Act (1902) also contained general provisions against sedition and inciting rebellion. Publicly pointing out someone as a strike breaker could in Norway and Denmark, in the same way as in Sweden, constitute defamation. Threats to strike breakers short of into complete coercion were punished in these three countries as attempted coercion. However, in both Norway and Denmark, an attempt was generally punishable in accordance with the provisions of the general criminal law. Thus, in contrast to the Swedish Akarp Act (1899), the Danish and the Norwegian offences of attempted unlawful coercion were not created to deal with supposedly unacceptable trade union dispute measures. 8. Conclusions The uniformadministration of justice generally presupposes that the interpretation by which decision-makers establish the content of applicable law takes place within the framework of a basically commonviewof society. The attainment of legal conformity therefore appears to be facilitated if there are few ideological differences of opinion put in issue when interpreting a legal rule. The majority of the descriptions of offences examined in this study included an element which was so ambiguous that uniformapplication of the lawmust actually have been quite difficult to achieve. The flexibility of the penal provisions meant that the assessment of the court of the social danger of an expression was influenced by whoever had expressed themselves, what and how many persons had become aware of the information and under which interior and foreign policy circumstances the expression was given. By way of example of the difficulties encountered by those wishing to adapt their participation in the political debate to the legal norms, it may be mentioned that as regards the so-called Gagging Act it sometimes happened that statements which could be interpreted as criticismof a course of action were considered to have constituted an endeavour to cause the same. The penal provisions examined by this study probably achieved approximately what they might have been expected to achieve, namely, that the ruling
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