Interaction with Authorities in Sweden

If your children are abducted to another country from Sweden, you can apply for financial help from the Legal Aid Body, which supports you with your legal expenses to some extent. Their role is to appoint a lawyer who directly manages the invoices submitted to them by your lawyers from abroad. 

After reviewing and approving these expenses, the Legal Aid Body in Sweden is supposed to reimburse your lawyers abroad fully. At the end of your litigation, they will ask you (the left-behind parent) to return ~40% of that amount to the Swedish Legal Aid Body. Of course, the exact % depends on the left-behind parent’s income, so in theory, it means you are receiving some relief regarding the horrible legal expenses incurred abroad. It sounds great? Don’t you think?

However, there is a small catch; nobody tells you there are limits to such financial aid. As usual, I had to learn this the hard way. After some time, they stopped supporting me. One of the reasons was that my case was too expensive for them to fund! As if it was my fault that these international cases are so expensive! In Belarus, the lawyers charge you up to 200 EUR/hour. So, if these legal cases are costly for the Swedish authorities, how on Earth is an average person supposed to deal with these expenses?

Who can afford to spend so much cash so quickly to battle a case abroad? Or, are we, the left-behind parents, indirectly suggested to give up and not even bother to battle for our Abducted children’s return because – it is too expensive?

Going back to the examples from America, wouldn’t it be cheaper if these International abduction cases were managed directly by the Swedish government instead of shifting the whole financial and legal burden onto their citizens, who already pay many taxes? So how is it my responsibility that Sweden has not created any logical and efficient way to deal with this?

Is there nobody in the Swedish government to understand that Europe is changing and that the increased migration of people will only trigger more of these cases? How do they want to handle more cases like this if just one single case was too much for them?

Furthermore, when it comes to their actual work, that also is too much for them to handle; these “experts” have confused the payments to the lawyers in Belarus. In one case, they sent the payment to the wrong account. In another case, they delayed payment for a very long time without explaining the reason.

As a result, this triggered a series of personal insults, humiliation, threats, and blackmailing from the representatives in Belarus directed personally at me because they believed that I was the one responsible for the failures of the Legal Aid Body in Sweden!

It went so far that one of my lawyers there sued me personally (for over EUR 5000) in Sweden. The other one, to “retaliate” for the nonpayment, has sent confidential and sensitive information about my case to the “Abductor”, of course, “by mistake”, as she claimed later.

All of this forced me to immediately travel to Minsk to find a new lawyer and postpone the planned hearing on the 5th of June 2018, adding more expenses to my already limited budget.

When I appealed their decision to stop further payments to Belarus, they completely ignored it and did not consider my arguments regarding the presented issues to them.

Evidently, this decision was taken to cover up the incompetence and irresponsibility of the Legal Aid Body Director, Mr. Bengt Arnstam, and of the lawyer S. E-C., whom they appointed for this job.

As you can see, working with the Swedish authorities and with the Swedish Legal Aid Body was just another horrible experience. The system is tailor-cut and bulletproof to cover the interests of the state and the incompetence of those well-paid individuals who work within it.

Nicolaos AA Cheropoulos
Stockholm, June 2020
Father of Anthie’ and Alexandra
Reviewed Oct. 2023