“Damn you. All Asians look the same according to SVT or what it is about,” Swedish journalist and author Jojje Olsson wrote on Twitter.
The post is a reaction to the TV program Kulturnyheterna, which is broadcast on the Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
In the programme, they referred to the report submitted to the commission that investigated the Swedish authorities’ attempt to release Swedish citizens imprisoned abroad.
One of them is publisher Gui Minhai, who was sentenced in 2020 to ten years in prison in China for sharing classified information with foreign powers.
However, the image used to illustrate the case showed a completely different person, according to the report Express.
The man in the photo is Yang Heng Jun, an Australian-Chinese writer and blogger, who was imprisoned in 2019 for speaking out about criticism of the Chinese regime. He was photographed with his wife.
daughter react
The newspaper wrote that the fatal error in the photo did not go unnoticed. Among those who interacted with Joey’s daughter, Angela Gui.
“Last Friday, the Commission of Inquiry released its report on the government’s handling of the situation of my father and Dawit Isaac. I have opinions on the subject that I will share soon, but first: why Kulturnyheterne chose to clarify the news with a photo of Yang Heng Jun and his wife,” she wrote on Twitter.
Imprisonment: Swede and Chinese Gui Minhai was one of five employees who disappeared in 2015 from a bookstore critical of the system, The Causeway Bay Book Store in Hong Kong. Photo by Philip Lopez/AFP)
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Later that same day, the answer came from editor Rebecca Lundberg in Kulturnyheterna. You begin by thanking them for letting them know about the error.
“The image is misleading in our archives. We expressly apologize and we will issue a correction on the radio tonight.”
criticism after investigation
The report discussed on the TV program concluded that the Swedish authorities’ handling of the cases of Goi and Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaac had several weaknesses.
The commission’s mandate was to investigate the work of the government, foreign ministry, and immigration authorities in releasing them from Chinese and Eritrean families, respectively.
The latter has been imprisoned for more than 20 years, while Gui has been in a Chinese prison since 2015, with the exception of a few months in 2017.
Weaknesses that the commission refers to were addressed in the first phase of imprisonment. More specifically, they believe that the authorities did not react quickly enough, Expressen writes.
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