Moa Lidén’s 2021 article in Svensk Juristtidning (SvJT 2021 s. 508-532)
reviews the Swedish resning institution:
the legal framework,
its handling entirely inside the ordinary courts,
and the grant rates that researchers have assembled
in the absence of official statistics.
The saved snapshot
is the journal’s open-access edition,
with the .raw.html companion kept as the provenance copy.
What the article establishes
Sweden is the outlier among its comparison set: Norway decides reopening applications in an independent commission, England and Wales in the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and Denmark in the special court Den Særlige Klageret, while Sweden decides them in the same court hierarchy that produced the judgment under attack. Swedish courts publish no statistics on resning applications; every available figure comes from individual researchers’ manual file reviews.
Lidén’s compiled Table 1 covers 5,732 applications across 41 non-contiguous years (1935-2020), with the caveat that the underlying studies differ in method:
| Period | Court | Overall grant | Private applicants | Prosecutor applicants | Without counsel | With counsel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1935-1958 | HD | 20.68% (127/614) | 7.60% (40/526) | 98.86% (87/88) | ||
| 2005-2010 | HD | 1.41% (17/1203) | 1.25% (15/1201) | 100% (2/2) | 0.74% (7/946) | 3.13% (8/255) |
| 2010-2014 | HD+HovR | 31.67% (658/2078) | 9.58% (149/1556) | 97.50% (509/522) | 4.13% (47/1138) | 24.40% (102/418) |
| 2015-2020 | HD+HovR | 24.82% (456/1837) | 7.85% (117/1491) | 98.40% (312/317) | 2.37% (27/1141) | 25.70% (90/350) |
| Total | 21.48% (1231/5732) | 6.72% (321/4774) | 97.95% (910/929) | 2.51% (81/3225) | 19.55% (200/1023) |
The structure behind the totals is the finding: the channel is effectively open to the state (prosecutor applications, mostly bulk tax and drink-driving corrections, granted at roughly 98 percent) and nearly closed to an unaided convicted person (2.51 percent without counsel), with fact-based innocence claims at the bottom (1.25 percent at HD 2005-2010). The high overall rates in later periods are driven by prosecutor bulk applications, which is why the table’s columns must not be averaged.
Limitations
The table stitches together studies with different scopes and methods, as Lidén warns; no statistics exist at all for 1959-2005. Grant-rate differences across periods therefore conflate institutional change with changes in application mix (the rise of prosecutor bulk applications after precedent shifts on drink-driving and tax crime).
Significance for the wiki
This is the quantitative spine of the claim in Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases and Correction channel that Sweden’s reopening gate is not merely strict but asymmetric: outcomes track who applies and with what help, not the merits distribution of the underlying claims. It grounds the Swedish half of Hidden miscarriage risk and correction-channel opacity across democracies.
Built on 1 source (1 external).
Working out connections…
Sources
Working out the neighbourhood…