The six former guardsmen were among 30 guardsmen who in the summer of 2022 had admitted to using drugs in connection with leaves from military service. Afterwards, they were stripped of their security clearance and dismissed, wrote NRK.
Afterwards, several of them said that they had felt pressured to confess.
In May last year, lawyer Inger Zadig notified a lawsuit against the state at the Ministry of Defense on behalf of the six guardsmen. On Monday evening, she delivered the summons to the Oslo District Court, writes Dagbladet.
– For my clients, this is about basic human rights, and about young people who will serve after them not being exposed to the same treatment, Zadig tells the newspaper.
– The Ministry of Defense has not yet been served with the lawsuit by the Oslo District Court and therefore does not know what allegations have been made in the case. As usual, the ministry will go through the subpoena thoroughly together with the Government Attorney as soon as it is served by the district court, special adviser Birgitte Frisch in the Ministry of Defense told NTB on Wednesday.
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From the summons, Dagbladet reports that it appears that the rust testing the guards were exposed to represented disproportionate coercion, that they were exposed to pressure, that the testing did not happen randomly and that they were also not assessed for the security risk of using illegal drugs.
The lawyer writes that there is no indication that the soldiers’ alleged drug use in their spare time affected their fitness as soldiers on duty.
