How diplomatic immunity silenced the prosecutor who coordinated Sweden’s EncroChat probe

Swedish desk

The Swedish desk at the European Union agency for criminal justice cooperation, Eurojust, headed by Swedish prosecutor Sloveig Wollstad, carried out much of the legal legwork for Sweden in the EncroChat operation.

Wollstad, a member of Eurojust’s executive board, supported by five Swedish prosecutors and a specialist in economics, was responsible for liaising with France and other countries over the legal aspects of the hacking operation.

Eurojust held five coordination meetings with France and the Netherlands to plan a hacking operation against the EncroChat phone network in Spring 2020. Sweden, the UK, Norway and Spain were invited to two of the meetings.

“By exchanging the data at a very early stage, the Swedish police managed to interrupt plans on killing people, on kidnapping people, and on trafficking different kinds of drugs,” Wollstad said in a videoed interview on October 2020 during a Eurojust Open Day.

The defence lawyers intended to question Wollstad about Sweden’s liaison with the French authorities over the EncroChat operation, codenamed Operation Emma in France and 26Lemont in Holland.

They also wanted to know about Eurojust’s contacts with representatives of Sweden’s National Operations Department (NOA), a police body that coordinates police operations.

The Court of Appeal for Western Sweden sent a summons to Solveig Wollstad at an address in Sweden, calling her to testify in person at the court.

It came after Linda H. Staaf, head of intelligence at NOA, submitted a letter as evidence to the court which identified Wollstad as the individual responsible for judicial cooperation between Sweden and France on the operation against EncroChat.

“The legal aspects of the information sharing from France to Sweden were handled via Europol by the Swedish representative in Eurojust. Further questions on this matter are therefore referred to the Prosecutor’s Office,” the note said.

Secrecy law invoked

Sweden’s prosecutor general, Petra Lundh, subsequently informed the court that she had decided that Wollstad could not testify.

Lundh argued that any testimony from Wollstad concerned matters of intergovernmental relations that were protected by Swedish secrecy law.

The disclosure of any information that had not already been made public could damage Sweden or its international relations with other countries, she said.

Defence lawyers told the appeals court that Sweden’s chief prosecutor had no legal mandate to prevent Wollstad giving evidence.

Wollstad working over Christmas

On 30 November 2021, Sweden’s chief prosecutor informed appeal court that “Wollstad will be serving at Eurojust during the Christmas holidays” and would not therefore be in Sweden on the day of the court hearing.

The Gothenburg court acknowledged that Wollstad, as a member of Eurojurst, had a duty of confidentiality but nevertheless agreed to issue a European Investigation Order requesting that Wollstad give evidence by an audio and video link from The Hague.

Five days before the hearing, Dutch prosecutors sent a message to the court of appeal saying that Wollstad was protected by diplomatic immunity and could no longer give evidence. The prosecutor wrote that Wollstad “cannot revoke her diplomatic immunity. This can only be done by Eurojust as an institution”.

Two days before the planned remote hearing, an officer from the Swedish court phoned Eurojust’s head of legal affairs to make enquiries about whether Wollstad’s diplomatic immunity could be waived. She was told that the court would have to make a written request to the president of Eurojust, who would have to convene member states to consider it – an impossible task in the time available.

The defence lawyers pushed for the court to summon Wollstad to Sweden to testify in late January on a day set aside for by the court for any overruns in the hearing.

“We argued in court that this is a very important piece of information for us that could have a big impact for the court’s decision and also the defence,” said Tügel.

But Wollstad told the court that she was unavailable to attend the hearing on 24 January.

On 18 January, the Court of Appeal dismissed the proposed hearing with Wollstad. It found that reasonable efforts had been made to hear the Eurojust prosecutor but that the case should not be delayed further.

No information about Swedish legal process

Tügel said the decision left defence lawyers with no clear idea of the legal process followed by Sweden to obtain the French intercepted material.

“Almost no information has been provided by the Swedish prosecution agency on how information was obtained from Swedish phones by the French authorities, and how the evidence was handled by the French authorities,” he said.

Under Swedish law, a court order is required to give permission for the French authorities to conduct interception of phones in Sweden, but Tügel said there is no evidence of such a court order being made.

“We would have liked to ask questions to Solveig Wollstad regarding how that could be, because in her capacity as Swedish member of Eurojust, she was the liaison point between Swedish authorities and the French authorities,” he said.

Swedish prosecutors have previously disclosed they do not know how the French Gendarmerie intercepted millions of messages from EncroChat phones.

“Due to the mutual trust between European countries, it is not Sweden’s role to question, or even ask, how the material came about,” the public prosecutor said in a statement on 22 April last year.

Defence lawyers question gaps in evidence

The NOA’s Staaf confirmed in court on 21 December that the Swedish Police had given French investigators permission by email to investigate the use of EncroChat phones by Swedish citizens.

Staaf, who also writes crime novels, went on to play a key role in the interception of encrypted messages from an encrypted phone network, Anom (also known as An0m), secretly run by the FBI in a joint operation with the Australian Federal Police. 

During a witness hearing at the Court of Appeal of Western Sweden, Staaf confirmed that Swedish prosecutors had received an electronic message from a joint investigation team (JIT) made up of French and Dutch police inviting Sweden and other countries to receive intelligence from the EncroChat hacking operation.

The email, sent on 27 March 2020 through Europol’s Sienna Information Exchange, required Swedish officials to confirm that they had “been briefed on the methods that had been used to generate data from devices in their jurisdiction”. They were also asked to confirm that they understood the “legal basis for the deployment” of the investigative measures used in France.

Asked whether the JIT understood the reply from the NOA as a consent to the conditions stated in the email, Staaf said she understood this to be the case. Staaf also stated that it was the international division at the NOA that replied to the email and that she had not been personally involved in the process of answering the e-mail from the Netherlands.

In a separate one-page letter submitted to the court, dated 16 July 2021, Staaf wrote that the Swedish Police received information available in France from the “EncroChat server” through an operational taskforce (OFT) at Europol.

The information Sweden obtained from EncroChat could be used for intelligence purposes under the agreement.

When the EncroChat operation became public in July 2020, Sweden was able to send European Investigation Orders to ask for permission to use EncroChat intercept in each individual pre-trial investigation.

Server or handset?

Defence lawyers have attempted to raise questions about claims by Swedish prosecutors that French police intercepted messages from EncroChat from servers in France, rather than from handsets in Sweden.

The claim appears to contradict the findings of the appeals court in the UK, which found the EncroChat messages had been extracted not from a server in France, but directly from phone handsets in the countries where the phones were used.

The origin of the messages is crucial, said Tügel, as evidence intercepted from handsets in Sweden without a court order from a Swedish court does not comply with Swedish law, and should not be admissible or be granted less weight.

“We have asked the prosecution authority on numerous occasions to give us reasons why they are stating that the information was gathered from the server,” he said.

“The only piece of evidence they presented during the district court trial and court of appeal was a document drafted and written by Linda H Staaf, stating that the information came from the server,” he said. Staaf, in turn, said she was given that that information by the Swedish prosecutor.

“So there is not a single piece of evidence, and I can say this without exaggerating, stating that the information came from the server,” said Tügel.

Ted Esplund, an employee of the intelligence division within the National Operations Department, also gave evidence during the case.

In his oral testimony in court, he stated that he was responsible for projects like EncroChat and other projects where there is close cooperation with international counterparts such as foreign Police departments and Europol.