The government wants to see completely mobile-free schools and recently presented an investigative proposal that all elementary schools should collect students' mobile phones in the morning and not return them until the end of the school day. The motivation is that mobile phone use disrupts concentration and increases the risk of online harassment.
But student councils and school newspapers rely on young people being able to communicate to organize themselves.
"The fact that students cannot use their mobile phones, not even during breaks, constitutes a practical obstacle to the exercise of the constitutionally protected freedom of association," write lawyers Fredrik Engström and Peter Hellman on DN Debatt.
They compare it to an employer confiscating union representatives' mobile phones during working hours, which would be unthinkable. They write further that the Law Council already in 2007 pointed out that collecting students' mobile phones constitutes a restriction of property protection under the European Convention.
"It is, in practice, a matter of confiscation, which in the rest of society is normally reserved for law enforcement authorities," they write and urge the government to throw the proposal in the trash can.
