In Sweden, some people are comparing it to the Nuremberg trials. Since then, in 2007, a Dutch businessman who had supplied chemical substances to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s has been sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment for complicity in war crimes.

But "this kind of trial is still very rare, and unique in Sweden," noted Mark Klamberg, Professor of International Law at Stockholm University. This makes the trial, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, September 5, at Stockholm District Court, exceptional in more ways than one. Scheduled to last until February 2026, it will be the longest trial in Swedish legal history. The prosecution case is 80,000 pages long and 90 witnesses will be called to the stand.

In the dock are Ian Lundin and Alex Schneiter, two former executives of the Swedish oil company Lundin Oil (which has changed its name several times since then), charged with "complicity in war crimes" in southern Sudan between 1999 and 2003. The Swedish justice system accuses them of involvement in the atrocities committed by the army and militias close to the regime in Unity State, which left 12,000 people dead and forced at least 160,000 to flee their homes.

Since the start of the investigation, the company has lodged a number of appeals. The last of these concerned the principle of universal jurisdiction of Swedish courts, contested by Alex Schneiter, a Swiss national living outside Sweden. On November 10, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled against him, paving the way for a trial that former prosecutor Magnus Elving questioned whether it would ever happen.

Now retired, he opened the preliminary investigation against Lundin Oil in 2010. A Swedish lawyer had sent him journalist Kerstin Lundell's book Affärer i blod och olja ("Business in blood and oil," 2010), which won the Guldspaden prize for investigative journalism. He had also read the report "Unpaid Debt", published at the same time by the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan, set up at the request of Sudanese NGOs.

Both describe the atrocities committed in southern Sudan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, highlighting the accountability of Lundin Oil. In 1997, the company, founded by Swedish businessman Adolf Lundin, was awarded a concession to explore and exploit oil in "Block 5A," a particularly fertile area in the center of Unity State, in the south of the country. It remained there until 2003.

A few years later, journalist Kerstin Lundell visited the area and met with witnesses: "They all said the same thing: despite years of civil war in Sudan, the region had been relatively unscathed, and then the oil companies arrived, and the violence began."

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