Sweden prosecutor accuses former ambassador to China Anna Lindstedt of brokering unauthorised meeting for Chinese-Swedish dissident’s release.
Sweden’s former ambassador to Beijing goes on trial in Stockholm on Friday accused of overstepping her mandate by trying to negotiate the release of a Chinese-Swedish dissident held in China.
Anna Lindstedt is accused of brokering an unauthorised meeting during her time as ambassador to get publisher Gui Minhai freed.
Prosecutor Henrik Olin laid out his case during Friday’s hearing, telling the court “Anna Lindstedt was at the time Sweden’s ambassador to China, but acted outside the bounds of the mandate she had for the consular case.”
He said the crime had endangered Sweden’s peaceful relations with China.
But defence lawyer Conny Cedermark replied that the only part of the prosecution’s description his client agreed with was that “Anna Lindstedt at the time was Sweden’s ambassador in China”.
Parts of the trial, which is set to run until June 22, will be held behind closed doors because of national security.
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At the heart of the case against Lindstedt is a January 2019 meeting she helped organise between Gui Minhai’s daughter, Angela Gui, and businessmen with ties to Beijing.
Angela Gui, who has been actively campaigning for her father’s release, wrote in February 2019 on her blog about a “strange experience” where Lindstedt had invited her to Stockholm in January.
During discussions in the lounges of a hotel in the Swedish capital, in the presence of Lindstedt, she was introduced to the businessmen who claimed they could help secure her father’s release.
In exchange, Angela Gui said she was told she “needed to be quiet” and to “stop all media engagement”, and she has later described the tone of the meeting as “threatening”.
Sweden’s intelligence service launched an investigation after reports of the meeting emerged.
The foreign ministry subsequently relieved Lindstedt, who was appointed as ambassador to China in 2016, of her duties but she has stayed on at the foreign ministry without an assignment.
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Meanwhile, the foreign ministry has maintained that it had no prior knowledge of the meeting, saying Lindstedt acted of her own accord.
The ex-ambassador has refrained from making any public statements, but communicated through her lawyer that she denied the charges and welcomed an investigation.
In February, a group of 21 former ambassadors wrote an op-ed in newspaper Dagens Nyheter, criticising the ministry’s decision to report Lindstedt to the police and arguing that she had acted well within her rights and role as an ambassador.
Lindstedt faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison for the crime of “arbitrariness during negotiations with a foreign power”.
