Claus Hjort Frederiksen has been a member of Parliament since 2005. He is one of the oldest and most respected figures in the Liberal Party, currently the largest opposition party. He has served as minister in the Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Lars Løkke Rasmussen administrations, the last time as Defense Minister until the latest parliamentary elections in 2019. As I mentioned regarding the arrest of Lars Findsen, head of the Defense Intelligence Service, Hjort Frederiksen was also charged with divulging classified security information.

Former Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen Photo: Mathias Svold

On May 12, Attorney General René Offersen announced that he wanted to indict Hjort Frederiksen (DK) for the transgression. The position of attorney general is not a political appointment. While it is part of the Ministry of Justice, the Minister of Justice cannot influence its actions. While Hjort Frederiksen might well have been indiscreet, did he really compromise national security and deserve, at age 74, up to 12 years behind bars? As a sitting MP, however, Hjort has parliamentary immunity and cannot be indicted unless a majority of Parliament votes to rescind his immunity.

The odd aspect of the situation is that the individual MPs may not be informed of the precise charges because they concern state secrets. Minister of Justice Mattias Tesfaye, a Social Democrat who had been appointed to the office only ten days before, proposed a procedure in which the various party leaders would be briefed on the charges and would instruct their party members how to vote. The party leaders thus had to consider both whether or not they wanted to rescind Hjort’s immunity and also whether they could accept a process in which rank-and-file MPs vote in ignorance of the actual allegations.

Kafka or Heller?

It is unclear why the MPs could not be entrusted with the full charges when they often come into possession of confidential information in closed hearings and committee work. There are leaks, it’s true. But the strange part of this impasse was that the supposedly top-secret information had already been made public in Hjort’s purportedly actionable utterances. News outlets have speculated about the particular statements and the occasions when Hjort disclosed it. The Danish Broadcasting Corporation supplied recordings of six interviews (DK) with major newspapers and TV networks that concerned mainly Denmark’s collaboration with the US National Security Agency on information transmitted via transatlantic cables.

The MPs thus could not be told which of the things that Hjort had broadcast to the world were too secret to be identified for them before they decided whether to try him for treason. Like Schrödinger’s ambiguous cat, the information in question is both everywhere on the internet and at the same time hidden even to the nation’s lawmakers.

Honor among thieves

The governing Social Democrats and three smaller left-wing parties advocated rescinding Hjort’s immunity, arguing that the case should be decided by the court. On the other side, the right-wing parties were joined by the ultra-left Red-Green party and eight independents, mainly on the rationale that the MPs should know what they are voting on. The last party leader to announce a decision and tip the scale in Hjort’s favor was Søren Pape Poulsen of the Conservative Party, who confessed that it was a difficult “dilemma.”

Tesfaye said he would not risk exposing the information to the full Parliament and dropped the case (DK). Hjort had earlier announced that he would not seek re-election. When his term ends sometime within the next year, he will lose his parliamentary immunity and then could be tried as a private citizen. Neither Tesfaye nor the attorney general would comment on the possible resumption of the case. Speculation then turned to whether Pape Poulsen, who in recent months has been mentioned as a candidate for prime minister, had in this affair shown himself to be too wishy-washy for the job.