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Did Sweden Pay Cambodia For the Pirate Bay Co-founder?
An anonymous reader writes "At the start of this month, news broke that The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm had been arrested in Cambodia. A bunch of updates followed, including that Svartholm would be deported to Sweden, and that the two countries of course collaborated on his capture. The latest tidbit, as of today, is the craziest one yet: Sweden essentially paid Cambodia tens of millions of dollars. The Government of Sweden has agreed to give 400 million Swedish Kronor ($59.4 million) to Cambodia for various reasons, including democratic development, human rights, education, environment protection, climate change, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. You name it (just don't say international arrests)."
Sweden is not neutral. Sweden has had a policy of being non-aligned in order to keep the ability of being neutral in the case of war. Sweden was never de-jure recognised as neutral. Although to some, Sweden, may be seen as de-facto neutral, the actual fact is that Sweden has been involved in numerous armed conflicts during the last century. In WWII Sweden who stayed outside of the main conflict, sided with Finland and even sent troops, both air force and army (including officers) that took part in combat operations, all-though technically they where sorted under Finnish flag, the fact is that they where endorsed by Sweden, how also sent over lots of arms.
In addition to this, Sweden has been a member of the EU since the 1990s, and even though the EU did not have mutual defence guarantees until the Lisbon treaty, the fact is that no EU state would remain neutral in the case of another one being attacked.
Sweden has also removed "neutrality" from their foreign policy documents. So, it has not been neutral nether de-facto or de-jure since before WWII. And especially, given the membership of the Union, the old motto of "non alignment in order to be able to be neutral in the case of war" has not been true for 20 years.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
3.5 million? really? this just shows that slashdot mods really dont care about facts and are happy to mod post with no reference with completely made up numbers.
... and for those of you who don't read swedish, Sweden has given between 150 - 200 million a year since 2009, and the 400 million allocated now is for 2 years, so theres no change there at all from last year.
Here are the actual numbers