The memory many still have from Schneiter\u2019s testimony a year earlier<\/a> is his description of himself as a \u201csub-surface guy,\u201d a geologist rather than an operator, \u201ca glorified secretary\u201d rather than someone directing events on the ground. Now his lawyers seek to build an entire defence around that operational and legal distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Defence lawyer Olle Kullinger opens by attacking the prosecution\u2019s overall method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe prosecution asked the court to evaluate the evidence from the perspective of the whole,\u201d he says. \u201cBut in criminal law, you evaluate the individual pieces of evidence first, and only then ask what whole they create.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the courtroom screens appear extracts from the Dutch case against the businessman convicted of supplying chemicals to Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq \u2014 a comparison prosecutors had invoked during their own closing arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kullinger dismisses the analogy. \u201cIf this case should be compared to anything,\u201d he says, \u201cthen it is Thomas Quick and Sture Bergwall.\u201d The reference lands heavily in the room. The Quick scandal \u2013 Sweden\u2019s most notorious miscarriage of justice \u2013 involved a psychiatric patient who confessed to multiple murders he had not committed, while investigators and courts interpreted contradictions as confirmations rather than warning signs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kullinger repeatedly returns to the comparison over the next several days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe forest cannot exist without trees,\u201d he says, responding to prosecutor Henrik Attorps\u2019 earlier plea not to \u201cmiss the forest for the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the defence, prosecutors had done exactly that: constructed a grand narrative about oil, war and displacement without proving any specific attack beyond reasonable doubt. The \u201ctrees,\u201d in the defence\u2019s metaphor, are concrete attacks on concrete villages at identifiable times. Without them, they argue, the \u201cforest\u201d of systematic unlawful warfare collapses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of Schneiter\u2019s defence becomes an attack on the evidentiary chain behind the prosecution\u2019s case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again and again, the lawyers argue that repetition has been mistaken for corroboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the screens, Kullinger traces how the figure of \u201c6,000 burned homes\u201d allegedly travelled from statements by rebel leader John Garang into NGO reports, journalism, academic work and eventually UN reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe original source is what matters,\u201d Kullinger says. \u201cNot the repetition.\u201d The defence repeatedly describes the material surrounding Block 5A oil exploration area as a kind of \u201cwhisper game,\u201d where information circulated through advocacy networks, aid organisations, journalists and rebel-linked intermediaries until claims hardened into accepted truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defence attacks the handling of audio material gathered by researchers where, translators added references to displacement, civilian targeting and dead children that were not present in the original recordings. \u201cAre these really \u2018no substantial deviations\u2019?\u201d Kullinger asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lawyers target prominent journalists and researchers who reported from southern Sudan during the war for their close collaboration with Sudan People\u2019s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebellion figures, which undermined their neutrality. It also argues that many NGO reports were produced with the logistical support of the SPLA, and interpreters tied to rebel structures. Photos shown in court depict researchers interviewing civilians while SPLA commanders, including Peter Gadet, sit nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn a criminal case,\u201d the defence argues, \u201cthis must affect evidentiary value.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t A central pillar of Schneiter\u2019s defence is that prosecutors never explained how information allegedly flowed from oil company meetings to battlefield crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On courtroom screens, Kullinger projects diagrams showing arrows moving from Lundin meetings through unknown officials inside the Sudanese state and eventually down to unidentified perpetrators committing attacks on the ground. Between every box appears the same phrase: \u201cbevistema saknas\u201d \u2014 \u201cno evidentiary theme.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the prosecution, Schneiter\u2019s requests for improved security and plans for seismic work in areas, contributed to military offensives that created conditions for oil operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the defence insists there is \u201cnot a single piece of evidence\u201d showing how such information travelled through the Sudanese system. Without proof that information actually reached military commanders and influenced operations, the alleged causal chain collapses, they argue. \u201cThis is a theoretical product without content.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again and again, Schneiter\u2019s lawyers return to the same image: three green lines drawn across a map of the area in a PowerPoint presentation during a meeting in Khartoum. The prosecution says those lines represented future exploration ambitions and triggered military operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defence calls the idea absurd. \u201cIf Schneiter believed these lines would lead to war,\u201d Kullinger says, \u201cthen the rational economic decision would have been not to draw them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n War, according to the defence, consistently prevented operations rather than enabling them. \u201cPeace made operations possible,\u201d defence lawyer Per E. Samuelsson says repeatedly during his pleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where the prosecution framed violence in Block 5A as connected to securing oil territory, Samuelsson presents an entirely different narrative: a fragmented southern conflict driven by old rivalries between Nuer factions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using long historical timelines, Samuelsson walks through splits between SSIM, SSUM, SPDF, forces loyal to Riek Machar, Peter Gadet and other commanders. The core argument is simple: the fighting had local political causes unrelated to Lundin\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defence repeatedly points to periods when oil activities expanded during ceasefires and stopped when conflict escalated. \u201cWe could operate when there was peace,\u201d Samuelsson says. \u201cWe could not operate when there was war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He cites internal security reports, local peace agreements and accounts from company security staff to argue that instability repeatedly halted the Swedish petroleum company operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toward the end of the pleadings, the defence launches a final legal attack: Samuelsson argues that prosecutors have invented \u201ca crime that does not exist\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The indictment, he says, does not identify concrete attacks with sufficient specificity. Instead, it refers broadly to \u201coffensive military operations\u201d and \u201cunlawful warfare\u201d over large geographic areas and long periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But international humanitarian law criminalises individual attacks, he argues \u2013 not a general atmosphere of warfare. \u201cThere is no crime called \u2018unlawful warfare,\u2019\u201d Samuelsson tells the court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To illustrate the point, he examines the February 2002 attack on Bieh, where civilians were killed during a World Food Programme food distribution. Even here, he argues, uncertainty remains over whether Sudanese forces mistakenly believed they were attacking military targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without detailed examination of each alleged attack, the court cannot conduct the proportionality analysis required under international law, the defence says. The lawyers cite legal opinions from Swedish international law scholar Ove Bring, whom, questioned whether the prosecution\u2019s construction corresponds to any recognised war crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the final day, the defence has spent four days dismantling almost every part of the prosecution\u2019s architecture: the witnesses, the NGOs, the journalists, the translations, the satellite analysis, the causal chains, the legal theory and even the definition of the alleged crime itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But beneath the technical arguments lies something broader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schneiter\u2019s defence is built on the idea that the prosecution\u2019s entire framework is backwards: that investigators began with the conclusion that Lundin Oil must have contributed to crimes, and then interpreted all evidence through that lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And like the Quick investigation, Kullinger argues, contradictory information never led investigators to reconsider the central hypothesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the proceedings draw to a close, Samuelsson turns once more to the map projected on the courtroom screens. Three green lines stretch across a swampy concession area in southern Sudan. \u201cIf I were a judge,\u201d he says, \u201cI would begin by asking whether these three green lines on a PowerPoint slide ever reached the alleged perpetrators \u201d of the war crimes of which Schneiter is accused of being an accomplice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe answer is obviously no.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He pauses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd there the case can stop. It should be easy to acquit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cA forest without trees\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Attacking the sources<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAn impossible crime\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Reframing the war<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere is no crime called \u2018unlawful warfare\u2019\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Lundin](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/South-Sudan-Sweden_Ian-Lundin-Alexandre-Schneiter-trial_@Olivier-Truc-540x360.jpg\")
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