Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen

Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen ( born June 26, 1959 in Oslo) is a Norwegian judge.

Career

Arntzen studied law and graduated from in 1986. From 1989 to 2003 she worked as a lawyer. It has been approved by the Attorney General's Office also at the Supreme Court in 1993. From 2003 to 2007 she worked as a lawyer in the Oslo office Kluge Advokatfirma. Afterwards she worked as a consultant on legal issues in the Norwegian Ministry of Justice. Since 2007, Arntzen has worked as a judge at the district court of the Oslo District Court.

She gained international fame as the presiding judge in the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the attacks in Norway, 2011. Already at the beginning of the process, they dismissed the jurors Thomas Indrebö his office. This was due to the independence Indrebös doubted, since it immediately after the massacre, demanded the death penalty for Breivik in a written by him Facebook post. She herself was also referred to by Breivik as biased with respect to the process. He justified this by saying that Arntzen from 2009 until shortly before the trial was in a committee commissioned by the Storting ( Norwegian parliament) controls the intelligence and security services of the country, have worked. The responsibilities of this committee are also in the monitoring of the domestic intelligence service PST, which was sharply criticized for that he was Breivik did not come to the track before the attacks. The Oslo district court ruled nevertheless that Arntzen was not caught up in this context. In addition, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Oslo, where she taught ethics among others.

Family

Her grandfather Sven Arntzen (1897-1976) was Attorney General at the Supreme Court in Norway. He contributed to the preparation of Landssvikanordning adopted by the Norwegian government in exile on December 15, 1944 ( treason Regulation ) with, a regulation for statute that provided the membership of the Nasjonal Samling retroactively criminalized, and was after the end of the German occupation decisively in the involved in implementation. This Regulation is now regarded as unconstitutional. Her father Andreas Arntzen (1928-2012) was also a well-known Norwegian lawyer and trial lawyer who was also known by the trial of Arne Treholt. Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen is married to a lawyer; the couple has two children.