Editors at National Review Online sound an alarm about the recent treatment of a government official in Finland.
Päivi Räsänen is a doctor, a grandmother, and a long-serving member of Parliament in Finland. She’s a conservative member of her nation’s Christian Democratic Party. On March 26, the Finnish Supreme Court determined that she is also a criminal.
She is guilty of writing a pamphlet in 2004 in which she expressed her views on sexual morality. She wrote that homosexuality was a developmental disorder. For republishing that pamphlet on her Facebook page in 2019, she has been convicted of “making available to the public a text that insults a group” and fined 1,800 euros. She was ordered to destroy and unpublish the offending text.
It was a mixed verdict, however. Räsänen was also acquitted by the court under hate speech laws for a 2019 post on Twitter/X in which she criticized her church’s sponsorship of a Pride event, quoting the book of Romans. This post was what precipitated her entire legal ordeal. Nevertheless, Räsänen has been convicted under the statutes that handle “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.”
The split verdict itself shows the incoherence of the hate speech laws in question. In one instance, the tweet, the court concluded that the accused was merely using religious language to speak out on a topical issue. In the case of the pamphlet, a 3–2 majority in the Supreme Court concluded the opposite. The minister of justice in the Finns Party, Leena Meri, said that the law was “not sufficiently precise and especially not predictable as required by the principle of legality in the criminal code.” Indeed, the case took eleven judges across different courts more than half a decade to determine this strange boundary between opinion and criminal insult. And nobody has even tried to describe in pithy, understandable language what the distinction between the two really is under the law.
