The prosecution of Anders Behring Breivik against the Norwegian state over its prison regime revealed enviable conditions of detention for many prisoners around the world.
The extremist who killed 77 people has three private rooms, parrots and an Xbox.
Since 2022, Breivik has been serving his sentence in a high-security compound in Ringerike prison, on the shores of the lake that bathes the island of Utøya, where he murdered 69 people, mostly teenagers, on July 22, 2011. A month earlier, he had detonated a bomb in Oslo that caused another eight victims.
The 44-year-old right-wing extremist has three single rooms (a living cell, a study cell and a gymnasium) on the top floor.
On the lower floor there is a kitchen, a living room with a video game console, a dining room and a room for visitors, all of which are shared (but never simultaneously) with another detainee.
"Breivik is treated particularly well" within the framework allowed by security criteria, prison director Eirik Bergstedt said.
The décor is relatively simple, but the rooms are well-equipped with several weight machines in their gym and with a large flat screen, armchairs to play Xbox with the guards, and posters of the Eiffel Tower in the living room.
Breivik's dining room has a flat-screen TV (AFP - Excelsior).
However, Breivik, sentenced in 2012 to a 21-year prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely, took the Norwegian state to court last week to protest against its prison regime.
Authorities want to "push me to suicide," he said at the trial.
"I want a PlayStation"
The extremist, who in a letter to AFP in 2014 threatened to start a hunger strike if he did not get a PlayStation 3 instead of the PS2, does not lash out at the material conditions of his detention, but at his isolation.
Separated from the other prisoners for 12 years, Breivik accuses the state of violating two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights: one that prohibits "inhuman" or "degrading" punishment and another that guarantees the right to correspondence.
"They've built a tower around me" to "lock me up," Breivik lamented. "I'm not a hamster, I need real relationships," he added.
Their isolation is relative.
Breivik's room (AFP - Excelsior).
In addition to contacts with guards with whom he can play cards, cook or have lunch, Breivik is allowed to regularly see a pastor, a physiotherapist, a psychiatrist or a Red Cross visitor with a dog to pet.
He himself put an end to contact with a visitor appointed by the authorities, but he can meet for an hour a week with another inmate, also hand-picked, with whom he can cook waffles, for example.
"Putin's table"
Such meetings usually take place around a table that Breivik calls "Putin's table" because, for security reasons, several guards sit between the two inmates.
In addition to having varied activities such as basketball games, walks or visits to a library, the authorities gave him three parrots to satisfy his desire to have a pet.
"
I had asked for a dog, a goat or a mini pig with whom I could maintain empathetic contacts, which can be a good alternative solution for people in isolation," Breivik said.
"But parrots are better than nothing," he admitted.
Authorities gave him three parrots to satisfy his desire for a pet (AFP - Excelsior).
Hosting mammals "is not very practical in a high-security facility," retorted a state lawyer, Kristoffer Nerland. "And besides, the veterinary authorities could say something about it," he added.
On social media, many netizens lash out at these conditions of detention, comparing them to "a hotel" or "a palace."
"Others take prison guards hostage so they can get a pizza," said one Swedish user on the social network X.
"The Norwegian system is what it is, but, as a mother whose daughter was killed, it's hard to see him complaining about his nice apartment," said Lisbeth Kristine Røyneland, whose daughter Synne was killed in Utøya at the age of 18.
"But at least he's behind bars and he'll never get out," she said.
AFP Agency.
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