Censorship in Sweden
overview of censorship in Sweden
Sweden protects freedom of speech in certain circumstances and was a pioneer in officially abolishing censorship. A number of restrictions remain such as child pornography, hate speech and libel. In all cases there is a legal process afterwards if applicable and no media are censored before publishing.
Abolition of censorship
Sweden was in 1766 the first country to introduce a constitutional law where censorship was abolished and the freedom of the press guaranteed. The Law on the Freedom of Printing of 1766 was written by a committee of the parliament, during the Swedish Age of Liberty (Frihetstiden). This law was also the first in the world to make most documents of the state authorities open and available for the citizens. This principle from 1766 is still an important part of the Swedish Constitution, and all Freedom of Information Acts in the world have grown from an application – usually in a very diluted way – of this Swedish "principle of public availability". The most important founding father of this part of the Swedish constitution was Anders Chydenius, a Finn, who was a member of parliament in the ecclesiastical estate. The freedom of the press is also guaranteed in the Free Press Statute of 1812.
After an interlude between 1772 and 1809, with royal dictatorship and renewed suppression, the freedom of the press was reintroduced by the parliament in the Constitution of 1809–10.
“Censorship in Sweden” enters the record as overview of censorship in Sweden. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Censorship, Sweden and overview can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5058935. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1766, 1812, 1772 and 1809.
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This entry incorporates text from “Censorship in Sweden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.