Forging legal communitas: physicians’ resistance in media discourses in Sweden's ‘Snitch Law’ debate

Abstract

In October 2022, the Swedish government announced a series of reforms in the field of migration policy, including a proposed legal obligation requiring all employees in public institutions, including healthcare professionals, to report people living as undocumented migrants in the country to the authorities. This article examines the intense public debate that followed, focusing on the interventions of physicians, their collectives, and medical organizations. In their responses, physicians protested by invoking their primary duty to provide care, the heightened vulnerability of undocumented patients, and the erosion of trust that such legislation would entail. In doing so, they rejected the intrusion of bureaucratic law, and what the social movement termed Angiverilagen (the ‘Snitch Law’), into clinical spaces, and instead oriented themselves towards the perceived moral compass of their profession. Through their collective resistance to the proposed legislation, we argue, physicians came to articulate an alternative normative order grounded in professional ethics: a legal communitas.