who?

This website is pretty much a glorified contact form, but since I'm already writing, I might as well include a brief bio for those who don't actually know who I am. Perhaps most importantly, I drink decaf coffee, and like cats.

Before moving to China, starting an NGO, and becoming a full-time human rights worker, I spent a few years working with, amongst other things, gender equality for the Swedish government. Yes, I'm Swedish, from what can best be called Sweden's answer to Dawson's Creek (minus all the rich people).

I am the founder and director of the foundation Safeguard Defenders, working with the rule of law, criminal justice, and human rights in East Asia, particularly in China, since 2017. For the decade preceding that, I was the director of a small Chinese non-profit, 'China Action'. It was based in Beijing, working with lawyers, journalists, and other NGOs, carrying out extensive training activities across the country, undertaking direct interventions to assist rights defenders, and engaging with public interest lawsuits against the government. It worked for ten years, or nine years and eight months to be exact, until I, like many coworkers, was detained, and we, out of safety for the many other coworkers at risk, had to pull the plug.

I became a minor celebrity for 15 minutes in early 2016 when placed into the then-unknown RSDL system for secret detentions. I spent just under a month in a suicide-padded and protected solitary confinement cell and was investigated for threatening national security. By the time I was deported, and we had to pull the plug on the NGO, nearly 30 staff or partners had either disappeared into the RSDL system, been detained or arrested, or convicted in sham trials and sent to prison, in particular during 2015 due to the "709 crackdown", also known as the "war on lawyers".

I escaped rather easily, compared with what happens to Chinese nationals arrested or placed into RSDL, and was deported, technically under the Espionage Act. Perhaps the brief fame came mostly from being paraded out on national TV regurgitating a ridiculous, scripted, and easily seen-through forced TV confession. Of all the things that happened, most of it was rather standard stuff for rights defenders in China, but the one thing that stood out is that I was subject to a five or six-hour-long lie detector test, which was a real interesting experience, and I'm pretty proud to be able to say that I manage to beat it.

Occasionally I write opinion pieces or dabble with longer-form journalism for places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Epoch Times. Occasional insights also appear on Twitter.

I now live in the safety of Western Europe after some years in Chiang Mai, Thailand, after spending a decade based in Beijing, China. I got two bachelor's degrees; in Political Science and Peace- and conflict studies and a master's in Political Science, studying way up north in the sub-arctic city of Umea from 1999 to 2004, where either the sun never sets (summer) or never rises (winter). I also spent a summer, 2004, at Shanghai's Fudan University, although much of that time was spent exploring jazz clubs in Shanghai rather than hanging around (the military bunker-filled) campus.

Winner of the 2021 Magntisky Award for outstanding human rights activism.