Skien, Norway // Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik made a Nazi salute yesterday as he arrived in court for his lawsuit against the Norwegian state, which he accuses of breaching his human rights by holding him in isolation.
Breivik turned towards the media present in the courtroom and extended his right arm.
Prior to the proceedings, several victims had expressed fears that the hearings would give the killer a platform for his right-wing extremist ideology.
Breivik is serving a maximum 21-year sentence for killing eight people in a bomb attack outside a government building in Oslo in July 2011, then murdering another 69 people, most of them teenagers, in a rampage at a Labour Youth camp on the island of Utoya.
His prison sentence can be extended if he is still considered a danger to society.
The 37-year-old has sued the state for breaching two clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights, one which prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, and one which guarantees the right of respect for “private and family life” and “correspondence”.
Since his arrest on July 22, 2011, Breivik has been held apart from other prison inmates and his contacts with the outside world are strictly controlled.
Prison officials censor his mail to prevent him from establishing an “extremist network”, according to authorities, and his rare visits are almost exclusively with professionals behind a glass partition.
After making his salute in a makeshift courtroom set up in the gymnasium of the Skien prison where he is being held, Breivik closely examined the faces of all those people present.
On several occasions during his trial in 2012, he made a variation of the Nazi salute by holding his closed right fist to his heart and then extending his arm.
In a letter dated October 27, 2014, he described himself as a “militant nationalist” and pledged his “allegiance to national socialism”.
In his opening remarks yesterday, Oystein Storrvik, Breivik’s lawyer, stressed that Brevik’s conditions were of particular importance given that he would probably spend “his whole life in prison”.
Mr Storrvik had said he was willing to take the case as far as the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Breivik had likened his prison environment to torture. He is suffering “clear damage” from his isolation, according to Mr Storrvik. The office of the attorney general, however, has insisted that Brevik’s prison environment are “well within the limits of what is permitted” under the human rights convention.
Brevik has access to three cells – one for living, one for studying and a third for physical exercise – as well as a television, a computer without internet access and a game console. He is able to prepare his own food and do his own laundry.
“There are limits to his contacts with the outside world, which are of course strict. But he is not totally excluded from all contact with other people,” Marius Emberland, the lawyer defending the state at trial, said ahead of the proceedings, citing Breivik’s contact with penitentiary staff.
* Agence France-Presse
