Mass killer Anders Breivik’s Nazi salute as he sues over ‘inhuman’ prison life

Right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, appeared in court on Tuesday to accuse the state of violating his human rights by holding him in isolation for almost five years. The 37-year-old fired off a Nazi salute as he entered the courtroom seeking to sue the state for breaching two clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights, one which prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, and one which guarantees the right of respect for “private and family life” and “correspondence”. For security reasons the four-day court proceedings are being held behind high grey walls, in the gymnasium of the Skien prison about 130 kilometres (80 miles) south-west of Oslo, where the killer is incarcerated.

He is adored in extreme-right circles and can spread hate from his cell.

Utoya survivor Viljar Hanssen

He is due to give evidence in person on Wednesday. Since the killings, he has been held apart from the rest of the prison population and his contacts with the outside world strictly controlled. His mail is censored by prison officials to prevent him from establishing an “extremist network”, according to authorities, and his visits, which are rare, are almost exclusively with professionals behind a glass partition. Breivik was in August 2012 handed a maximum 21-year sentence for killing eight people in a bomb attack outside a government building in Oslo and then murdering another 69 people, most of them teenagers, in a rampage at a Labour Youth camp on the island of Utoya.

One of his main things to do (in prison) was to study and he has stopped that now, and I feel that is a sign that isolation has been negative to his psychological health.

Breivik’s lawyer Oystein Storrvik

Anders Breivik