In courtroom 34 of the Stockholm District Court, HDMI cables are unplugged and reconnected, PowerPoint presentations flicker across the screens and assistants hand out new bundles of documents in white paper bags stamped with a black logo.
The rustling makes it hard to hear the opening words of former Lundin’s CEO Alexandre Schneiter’s defence team as they begin four days of closing arguments. It is May 5, and after nearly three years of trial proceedings, Schneiter’s lawyers are no longer primarily arguing about Sudan. They are arguing about evidence itself.
The memory many still have from Schneiter’s testimony a year earlier is his description of himself as a “sub-surface guy,” a geologist rather than an operator, “a glorified secretary” rather than someone directing events on the ground. Now his lawyers seek to build an entire defence around that operational and legal distance.
“A forest without trees”
Defence lawyer Olle Kullinger opens by attacking the prosecution’s overall method.
“The prosecution asked the court to evaluate the evidence from the perspective of the whole,” he says. “But in criminal law, you evaluate the individual pieces of evidence first, and only then ask what whole they create.”
On the courtroom screens appear extracts from the Dutch case against the businessman convicted of supplying chemicals to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — a comparison prosecutors had invoked during their own closing arguments.
Kullinger dismisses the analogy. “If this case should be compared to anything,” he says, “then it is Thomas Quick and Sture Bergwall.” The reference lands heavily in the room. The Quick scandal – Sweden’s most notorious miscarriage of justice – 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.
Kullinger repeatedly returns to the comparison over the next several days.
“The forest cannot exist without trees,” he says, responding to prosecutor Henrik Attorps’ earlier plea not to “miss the forest for the trees.”
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 “trees,” in the defence’s metaphor, are concrete attacks on concrete villages at identifiable times. Without them, they argue, the “forest” of systematic unlawful warfare collapses.
Attacking the sources
Much of Schneiter’s defence becomes an attack on the evidentiary chain behind the prosecution’s case.
Again and again, the lawyers argue that repetition has been mistaken for corroboration.
On the screens, Kullinger traces how the figure of “6,000 burned homes” allegedly travelled from statements by rebel leader John Garang into NGO reports, journalism, academic work and eventually UN reporting.
“The original source is what matters,” Kullinger says. “Not the repetition.” The defence repeatedly describes the material surrounding Block 5A oil exploration area as a kind of “whisper game,” where information circulated through advocacy networks, aid organisations, journalists and rebel-linked intermediaries until claims hardened into accepted truths.
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. “Are these really ‘no substantial deviations’?” Kullinger asks.
The lawyers target prominent journalists and researchers who reported from southern Sudan during the war for their close collaboration with Sudan People’s 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.
“In a criminal case,” the defence argues, “this must affect evidentiary value.”
“An impossible crime”
A central pillar of Schneiter’s defence is that prosecutors never explained how information allegedly flowed from oil company meetings to battlefield crimes.
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: “bevistema saknas” — “no evidentiary theme.”
According to the prosecution, Schneiter’s requests for improved security and plans for seismic work in areas, contributed to military offensives that created conditions for oil operations.
But the defence insists there is “not a single piece of evidence” 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. “This is a theoretical product without content.”
Again and again, Schneiter’s 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.
The defence calls the idea absurd. “If Schneiter believed these lines would lead to war,” Kullinger says, “then the rational economic decision would have been not to draw them.”
War, according to the defence, consistently prevented operations rather than enabling them. “Peace made operations possible,” defence lawyer Per E. Samuelsson says repeatedly during his pleading.
Reframing the war
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.
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’s operations.
The defence repeatedly points to periods when oil activities expanded during ceasefires and stopped when conflict escalated. “We could operate when there was peace,” Samuelsson says. “We could not operate when there was war.”
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.
“There is no crime called ‘unlawful warfare’”
Toward the end of the pleadings, the defence launches a final legal attack: Samuelsson argues that prosecutors have invented “a crime that does not exist”.
The indictment, he says, does not identify concrete attacks with sufficient specificity. Instead, it refers broadly to “offensive military operations” and “unlawful warfare” over large geographic areas and long periods.
But international humanitarian law criminalises individual attacks, he argues – not a general atmosphere of warfare. “There is no crime called ‘unlawful warfare,’” Samuelsson tells the court.
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.
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’s construction corresponds to any recognised war crime.
By the final day, the defence has spent four days dismantling almost every part of the prosecution’s 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.
But beneath the technical arguments lies something broader.
Schneiter’s defence is built on the idea that the prosecution’s 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.
And like the Quick investigation, Kullinger argues, contradictory information never led investigators to reconsider the central hypothesis.
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. “If I were a judge,” he says, “I would begin by asking whether these three green lines on a PowerPoint slide ever reached the alleged perpetrators ” of the war crimes of which Schneiter is accused of being an accomplice.
“The answer is obviously no.”
He pauses.
“And there the case can stop. It should be easy to acquit.”
