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“Freedom Of Movement Is A Fundamental Right”
As if following the pattern of a migratory bird, Iceland’s refugee issues have yet again flown into the discussion. Last year’s harbinger of spring was an Iranian refugee’s attempted self-immolation inside the Red Cross headquarters of Reykjavík. This time it was the…
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Iceland’s Courts Jail Teen Refugees
At the same time as Iceland’s media revelled in its news last week about Iceland being one of “the best country in the world for children,” it became known that two Algerian boys, aged 15 and 16, had been sentenced to thirty…
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Back To The Future
“Good things happen slowly,” Björn Bjarnason, Iceland’s former Minister of Justice, wrote on his blog in March of last year when his successor in office, Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson, called for a press conference to announce that the police would…
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ENVISION SOMETHING DIFFERENT
Since the local fish factory in Stöðvarfjörður closed down in 2005 and its 32 employees lost their jobs, the eastern municipality of roughly 200 people has faced a serious decline. Like many of Iceland’s small towns, this community has faced a systematic…
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A Vicious Circle Of Victimisation
In late October last year, a group of burka-dressed women who called themselves Big Sister, announced that they had “gone underground” to collect a list of 56 names and 117 numbers of alleged prostitution purchasers, which they then handed to the police.…
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For The Greater Glory Of… Justice?
Criminal court cases, waged by The State against political dissidents for acts of protest and civil disobedience, can be understood in two ways. Firstly, the juridical system can be seen as a wholly legitimate platform for solving social conflicts. Such a process…
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When Two Become One
Those who are yet to give up on Icelandic media cannot have avoided noticing one Kristján Már Unnarsson, a news director and journalist at TV station Stöð 2. Kristján, who in 2007 received the Icelandic Press Awards for his coverage of “everyday…
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TIME STANDS STILL
Friday September 2, two men appeared in court in downtown Reykjavík. It wasn’t their first time—and it probably won’t be their last. If found guilty, the defendants, Haukur Hilmarsson and Jason Thomas Slade, face up to six years in prison, due to…
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Too Huge For A Monument
When Helgi Hóseasson passed away two years ago, he had since the 1930s fought a harsh fight to get the National Church to revoke the baptismal covenant that was forced upon him as an infant in 1919. Using a vast variety of…
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Shoot Teenagers and Fight Environmentalists
In a very short time the discourse following last week’s right-wing terrorist attacks in Norway reached both absurd and scary heights, with one of the best examples being American TV and radio host Glenn Beck’s attempt to justify the mass murderer by…
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The Best Of Reykjavík : The Anarchist’s Edition
An anarchist interested in history might want to take an ‘oppression tour’ around the city, checking out important power-symbols like the police headquarters at Hlemmur, the cabinet building at the bottom of Bankastræti (originally built as a prison, this tiny cabin allowing…
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THE REYKJAVÍK ONE
A little more than a year ago, several Icelandic bankers were arrested and kept in custody in relation to the Special Prosecutor’s investigation into the 2008 economic collapse, its antecedents and causes. Appearing in political TV talk show Silfur Egils shortly afterwards,…
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The First Step Away From Segregation
Words are weapons. Controlling language—the meaning of words, which words exist and which do not—is the ruling powers’ fundamental premise to keep society stagnant or sway it toward their ideological direction. This is for example known to Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson, professor at…
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Political Persecution: Setting Examples
December 8 marks the two-year anniversary of an event that was later turned into a textbook example of political persecution. Thirty people tried to enter the public benches of Iceland’s Parliament but were stopped by guards and police. For almost a year…
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The Nationalistic Grounds for Neo-Nazism
When today’s upswing of fascism and neo-Nazism is discussed, referring to Nazi Germany is a certain taboo and a sidetracking cliché. It is taboo because in the eyes of so many it is never legitimate to compare anything with the Third Reich…
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Does Man Own Earth?
There are countless reasons for Magma Energy not being allowed to purchase HS Orka. Those who have no idea why should quit reading this and get their hands on books like Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and documentaries like ‘The Big Sellout’…