Aihe: Itsenäisyyspäivän vetoomus poliittisten puolueiden uudistamisesta Laki poliittisista puolueista annetun lain muutosehdotuksista on ilmaistu huolestuneisuutta, että ne voivat rohkaista antidemokraattisia elementtejä aktivoimaan poliittista toimintaa. Lain tulisi sisältää erityissäännöksiä, joiden mukaan ryhmät, jotka vastustavat demokraattista hallintotapaa, eivät saisi perustaa puolueita ja henkilöt, jotka ovat käyttäytyneet laittomasti tavalla, joka rikkoo Suomen perustuslaissa ja kansainvälisissä sopimuksissa esitettyjä demokraattisia periaatteita, eivät saisi asettaa mihinkään virkaan tällaisissa poliittista asemaa hakevissa järjestöissä eikä myöhemmin.
Erityisen huolestuttavia ovat ryhmät, jotka kannattavat epädemokraattisia hallintomuotoja oletetun sananvapauden varjolla. Nämä henkilöt viittaavat usein sananvapauteen Suomen perustuslaissa tai kansainvälisissä ihmisoikeussopimuksissa. Henkilöitä, jotka toistuvasti tekevät loukkauksia ja laittomia tekoja, jotka kieltävät toisten ihmisarvon ja kunnioituksen, ei voida perustellusti pitää muuna kuin demokratian ja demokraattisten oikeuksien vastustajina. Vastaavasti henkilöitä, jotka kiihottavat vihaa tiettyjä ihmisryhmiä kohtaan ja jotka ovat lain nojalla tuomittuja, on pidettävä kelpaamattomina osallistumaan poliittisten puolueiden johtoon.
Viimeksi mainitussa yhteydessä viittamme toisen maailmansodan jälkeen allekirjoitettuun Pariisin sopimuksen lausekkeisiin, ja Suomelle asetettuihin erityisvaatimuksiin, jotka koskevat rasistisia ideoita kannattavien tai tällaisia ideologioita toteuttavia ryhmiä. Näihin vaatimuksiin liittyminen oli välttämätöntä suomalaisen elämäntavan kannalta keskeisen demokraattisen poliittisen järjestelmän palauttamiseksi . Mainitussa sopimuksessa vaaditiin liittymässä olevilta valtioilta erityisiä oikeudellisia järjestelyjä, kuten nykyisessä Saksassa vallitsevia, joita esimerkkejä ei juurikaan mainita nykyisen lainsäädännön valmistelutyössä huolimatta niiden merkityksestä kyseessä olevaan lakiuudistukseen.
Paitsi tehtävänä asianomaiselle ministeriölle, joka tarkistaa puolueiden säännöt rekisteröinnin ja valittujen virkailijoiden rekisteröinnin yhteydessä, tama valvonta on myös täsmennettävä lainsäädännössä. Joitakin rajoituksia voidaan harkita tällaisille poissulkemisille joille vaalikausi voi olla kohtuullinen raja. Tällaisen demokraattisten oikeuksien ja vapauksien kunnioittamisen valvonnan tulisi ulottua paitsi henkilöihin ja ryhmiin, jotka haluavat rekisteröidä uusia puolueita, myös virkanimityksiin nykyisissä puolueissa ja niiden komiteoissa. Demokratian puolustaminen on Suomelle niin tärkeää, että hallinnolliset järjestelyt sen suojelemiseksi epävarmoina aikoina, kun vietämme Suomen itsenäisyyden 103. vuotta, edellyttävät tarkkuutta ja valppautta.
Helsingissä 6. joulukuuta 2010
Suomen Viharikosvastainen yhdistys *- Suomen Akateemiset Ulkomaalaiset ry
*Yhdistyksemme on perustettu syyskuussa 2018 ja rekisteröitynyt kansalaisjärjestöksi seuraavassa kuussa. Kansalaisjärjestön tavoitteena on torjua ja poistaa viharikokset ja kaikenlainen syrjintä Suomesta, kuten antisemitismi, islamofobia, afrofobia, misogynia ja muut sosiaalisen syrjäytymisen muodot koulutuksen, seminaarien, tapahtumien ja konferenssien avulla.
Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finalnd (Suomen viharikosvastinen yhdistys ry, Finska Anti-Harbrottsorganisation rf) celebrated on December 5 its Annual General Meeting. Apart from strategic matters, the meeting elected the following board members for the 2020-2022 term:
Suomen viharikosvastainen yhdistys ry, Finska Anti-Harbrottsorganisation rf, Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland announces that it will hold its annual general meeting (AGM) on Saturday, 5 December 2020, at 2 pm. The AGM will be aired via Zoom. If you are interested in attending, please send to svyfinland@gmail.com a request to attend and we will send you a link to participate via Zoom. Documents and other information will be sent on the same week that the meeting will take place.
The Police University College published this week its latest suspected hate crime statistics for 2019. It showed that while hate crimes, on the whole, had retreated a tad compared with 2018, 87.1% of all suspected cases were due to a person’s ethnic or religious background.
Other suspected hate crimes were due to sexual orientation (72 cases/5.7%), disability (44/4.9%), and gender identity (21/2.3%).
While we understand that these cases, like that of sexual assaults, are only the tip of the iceberg, the important question we should ask is how to challenge hate crime effectively.
This may be easier said than done since Finland is still living in denial about hate crime, hate speech, and racism.
Nobody has yet given a fair and honest answer to how Finland, with one of the best education systems in the world and whose laws are supposed to promote social equality, has seen the growth of an openly racist party called the Finns Party (PS).
If Finland’s second-biggest party in parliament is openly Islamophobic and turns a blind eye to far-right ideology among its ranks, should we be surprised that so little is being done politically to challenge a social ill like racism?
The biggest problem in the police service’s relationship with racism and different minority communities in Finland is the low priority of racism and lack of openness. Sometimes, one gets the impression that the police fear more the reaction of a minority community to what happened to a victim of its group than taking a public stand against hate crime.
Another matter that is a blow to police trust in resolving hate crime cases is time. Many who have reported racist harassment and threats understand that your case may take months to resolve. In such cases, the police may overlook the bias motivators in Jämsä of an asylum seeker.
Another case that received wide coverage in June was an eighteen-year-old Muslim, who was chased and physically attacked by locals in Teuva, a town in western Finland.
Last week, we read about two cases where the police service did not find bias indicators in two violent cases involving a Somali Finn and an asylum seeker in Jämsä.
The formula for determining a hate crime is straightforward: crime + bias motivation = hate crime.
The following bias indicators are taken into account when determining a hate crime: comments, victim perception, organized hate groups, pattern, intense violence and specific targeting, no other obvious motive, timing, and differences between the victim and the perpetrator(s).
The Criminal Code of Finland does not recognize the term “hate crime.” Section 5 states that a basis for increasing punishment (564/2015) is if the “offense for a motive based on race, skin color, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or another corresponding grounds.”
Case One
Involves the death of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn stabbed in April by a white Finn at the Kannelmäki train station. On September 14, the suspect was handed a five-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
The mother of the victim said that she and her husband are unhappy with the sentence.
“The prosecutor tried to get a hate crime charge pinned on the suspect,” said the mother, Ilhan Jama. “The person [who stabbed my son] alleged that he was scared by my son’s presence, or that a dark-skinned person was walking towards him down the stairs.”
Case Two
The second case, involving an asylum seeker in the Central Finnish town of Jämsä, appears to have left out important information about the crime.
Even if the asylum seeker does not speak Finnish well enough, he did make out the following words: vitun pakolainen (f**king asylum seeker) and vitun ulkomaalainen (f**king foreigner).
Doesn’t this point to a possible hate crime? The crime is an unlawful threat with a knife + victim perception = hate crime.
The knife used to threaten the asylum seeker.
Steps in the right direction
Whenever the police fails to convince that bias motivation was not a factor it is a blow to the credibility and fuels greater mistrust from the victim’s group.
Another factor that undermines trust is the long length of these investigations, which in the Jämsä asylum seeker case took over a year.
If the police and Finland’s institutions, which are mainly white, want to fuel trust and good relations with our culturally diverse communities, they should pay special attention and implement measures that increase trust.
For further information contact:
Enrique Tessieri, European Islamophobia Report Finland chapter author
+358 40 8400773
admin@nohatefinland.org
* Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland was founded in September 2018 and registered as an NGO the following month. The aim of the NGO is to tackle and eradicate hate crime and all forms of discrimination in Finland such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Afrophobia, misogyny, and other forms of social exclusion through education and training, seminars, events, conferences, among others.
On June 7 in the western Finnish town of Teuva a Muslim was attacked by white Finns. If we look at the bias indicators, three factors stand out: victim perception, the severety of the violence (the victim was taken to a hospital for treatement), and vandalizing and writing graffiti on his car.
While hate speech is not a hate crime, in this case, it is a strong case for bias motivation. The suspects threatened to kill him, and while assaulted, an older man asked him to “ask Allah for help.”
A hate crime is a criminal offense that has a bias motivation targeting a particular group that could be based on real or perceived gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, or disability.
Even if crimes are serious offenses, a hate crime can have a lasting impact on the victim and his community.
We are not the only ones who are concerned about eh racist aspect of the crime, The mayor of Teuva Veli Nummela, the town’s newspaper Tejuka were just as adamant about the motivation of the crime.
Nummela wrote in a blog: “We will evaluate these practices [anti-racism] at the beginning of the new school year. We want to do our best in the fight against racism and violence and respect for human rights.”
Tejukka‘s June 17 editorial, “Measuring civility,” openly condemns what happened to the Muslim, adding that “racism should not be accepted in any shape or form.”
The town newspaper also published several stories about the incident interviewing the victim, the police, and a foreigner living in Teuva.
The police are not ruling out a hate crime but appear not to be in any rush to do so.
According to the Criminal Code of Finland (766/2015), Section 5, there are grounds for increasing the punishment if the crime “was based on race, skin color, birth status, national of ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability of another corresponding grounds.”
The police state: “For now there is no information that points to a hate crime but we are not excluding such a possibility.” No evidence of a hate crime (bias indicator)? For one, check out the victim’s car. Source: Poliisi
I spoke with the Muslim today, and he is recovering from what happened but is still clearly shaken by what happened.
“I will move [from Kristiinankaupunki] to Helsinki at the end of this month,” he said. “I cannot live here because I am afraid to go outside.”
The bias indicators of this crime speak for themselves and suggest that what happened was no ordinary crime but also a hate crime.
For further information contact:
Enrique Tessieri, chairperson, Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland
+358 40 8400773
admin@nohatefinland.org
* Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland was founded in September 2018 and registered as an NGO the following month. The aim of the NGO is to tackle and eradicate hate crime and all forms of discrimination in Finland such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Afrophobia, misogyny, and other forms of social exclusion through education and training, seminars, events, conferences, among others.
Who are the most “notable” figures of Finland’s Islamophobic network in 2019? In the list below, 13 are members of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party, 3 are National Coalition Party (NCP) members, 2 are Christian Democrats (KD), and three others are political “freelancers:” Marco de Wit, Junnes Lokka, and Tiina Wiik.
The list, which is far from complete, was published in the European Islamophobic Report 2019, the most comprehensive report on anti-Muslim racism in Europe.
So who are they?
Source: Eduskunta
Jussi Halla-aho: an old-timer Islamophobe convicted in 2012 for ethnic agitation and for breaching the sanctity of religion. Halla-aho recently said that nobody would have no reason to masturbate if there were no news about migration and asylum seekers. He aims to end Muslim immigration to Finland.
Riikka Purra: An Islamophobe who commonly blames all of the country’s problems on migrants and especially Muslims. Her political career relies strongly on Islamophobia. She commonly uses the term “harmful” immigration to describe Muslims and other people of color but doesn’t understand that she is a “harmful” MP to Finland’s growth and health.
Sebastian Tynkkynen: Convicted two times for ethnic agitation, he is usually the first one to cast the Islamophobic stone at Muslim victims. Tynkkynen was one PS politician who profited from the Oulu sexual assault cases and got a ticket to parliament.
Ville Tavio: One wonders if this politician is a lawyer or not when he talks about Muslims. One of the many things he has proposed is changing the Finnish Constitution so that Finns would have greater rights over foreigners. He has a hard time accepting that everyone, irrespective of one’s background, is equal before the law.
Sources: Euroopean Parliament and Eduskunta
Laura Huhtasaari: The far-right Islamophobic rhetoric of this MEP appears to have supercharged in Brussels. Like Purra and other PS women politicians, she too sees Muslims under her bed and believes we will all be reading from the Koran soon. She commonly praises US President Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
Juha Mäenpää: It’s evident that this MP does not like Muslims. In 2015, he said God had answered his prayers when an asylum reception center was razed to the ground. In 2019, he got in trouble by comparing migrants to an “invasive species.” The PS politicians usually speak in code. Mäenpää meant asylum seekers and Muslims when he mentioned invasive species.
Ano Turtiainen: This politician has gained national and international notoriety for a tweet that mocked the death of George Floyd. Before the tweet, Turtiainen has published a lot of racist posts on social media.
Jari Ronkainen: Is a politician who loathes Muslims and multiculturalism. It’s no surprise that he, therefore, lobbies for tighter migration laws and faster deportations of migrants. A racist video that denigrates migrants in a video is only a part of his Islamophobic repertoire. He supported in 2018 an initiative to prohibit young girls from using veils.
Sources: City of Helsinki, Eduskunta, and the PS
Matias Turkkila: If there is a person in Finland who has facilitated and given Islamophobes a platform to voice their racism, that person is without a doubt Matias Turkkila. In a recent Tweet, he cried about Katie Hopkins’ permanent suspension from Twitter. Editor of the PS’ Suomen Uutiset and Halla-aho’s former campaign manager.
Sanna Antikainen: This MP’s Islamophobia from Outokumpu (population 6,803) resembles the town’s name, which means “strange hill.” Even if her hometown has hardly any foreigners, Antikainen is a fervent Islamophobe and supporter of US President Donald Trump. She is a trained nurse, but would she attend to Muslims or people of color if she were working at a hospital? One of her favorite lines is that Europe “isn’t the social welfare office of the world.”
Asseri Kinnunen: The PS Youth politicians is a member of the far-right and Nazi-spirited Suomen Sisu association. He likes to wear fascist shirts and ties of the Lapua Movement of the 1930s. Does Kinnunen house Islamophobic views? Guess.
Sources: Facebook, Eduskunta, National Coalition Party
Johannes Sipola: After the Christchurch massacre in March 2019, Sipola tweeted: “The New Zealand case show ever-convincingly that multicultural society does not work. When other people [of other backgrounds] rape and kill enough [people], it is only a question of time when there will be a reaction from the opposite side. First and foremost, everyone defends their own kind.”
Wille Rydman: For some in his party, Rydman is considered the Halla-aho of the National Coalition Party due to his Islamophobic and far-right views. He warned last year that the ethnic composition of Europe is changing due to low birth rates and that such ethnic diversity is harmful to the region.
Atte Kaleva: Selfies with Jussi Halla-aho and spreading Islamophobic soundbites is what Kaleva does in the belief they will get him elected to parliament. The good news is that such tactics haven’t worked. Like Rydman, Kaleva would be more at home in the PS. An Islamophobe populist opportunist.
Kai Mykkänen: The Oulu sexual assault cases in 2018-2019 that caused hysteria to spiral out of control in Finland, Mykkänen, who was then interior minister, lobbied for stricter laws, faster deportations, and even tests to asylum seekers to prove that they understood Finnish values. Mykkänen forgot to mention that Finnish men are also guilty of sexual assault and violence.
Sources: Eduskunta, SKE, City of Oulu
Sari Essayah: This conservative politician is a strong supporter of Israel’s settlement expansion in Palestine. Under her leadership, the Christian Democrats have moved politically closer to the PS’ and NCP’s on immigration and asylum issues. She has demonized Muslims and blamed sexual crimes on cultural factors. In one election compass, Essayah had “no opinion” whether it was the EU’s obligation to save asylum seekers from drowning in the Mediterranean.
Päivi Räsänen: This homophobic politician does not usually have kind things to say about Muslims from the Middle East unless they are Christians. As interior minister, she denied that ethnic profiling was carried out by the police even if studies proved the contrary. In January, she spread a rumor that a school in Helsinki had substituted Mohammed for Jesus Christ at a Christmas celebration party.
Marco de Witt: A loudmouth Islamophobe who desecrated the Quran in public last year. He was so obnoxious that he was kicked out of the Finland First (Suomen Kansa Ensin) political party and movement.
Junnes Lokka: A Moroccan-born Islamophobe who hates Muslims and asylum seekers. During the Oulu sexual assault cases last year, Lokka and Wiik were Katie Hopkins’ hosts in Oulu. Hopkins was recently banned permanently from Twitter because of her “hateful conduct.”
Soure: Twitter
Tiina Wiik: She hosts with Lokka Vihapuhe FM or Hate Speech FM. During these transmissions, you will hear the views of Finland’s most questionable far-right politicians and Islamophobes. The couple organizes far-right events in Finland as well.
This story was originally published in Migrant Tales.
SETA will publish 2019 European Islamophobia Report on 20th June Saturday after the opening panel of the Report. Edited by Enes Bayraklı and Farid Hafez European Islamophobia Report (EIR) published annually since 2015. The EIR 2019 includes a general assessment of Islamophobia in Europe in the year 2019 and 32 country reports that include almost all EU member states and additional countries such as Russia, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro. The EIR 2019 brought together 32 scholars, experts, and civil society activists from various European countries who are specialized on racism and Islamophobia studies. They cover various issues from media, politics, and the justice system to the Internet, and offer concrete policy recommendations for civil society and politics. As our audience grows to include practitioners, scholars, and the general public, our website has acquired an audience from 165 countries, and the EIR and its findings have been cited frequently by international organizations, politicians, NGOs, scholars, and local and international media outlets.
In 2019, while the Islamophobic terror attack in Christchurch in New Zealand made the headlines, mosques have also been targeted in Germany, UK, France and Norway resulting to dozens of deaths and injured persons. Facing this rising threat, European states show an ambiguous stance. On the one hand, European governments work hard to track far-right terror groups and dismantle them. On the other, they participate in the normalization of Islamophobic discourses in Europe through discriminative declarations, bills and security policies targeting Muslim people. As the result of this normalization, not only far-right but also democrat and liberal majority governments started to put the life of Muslims into jeopardy and to undermine their fundamental rights.
In Austria for instance, the FPÖ submitted an amendment to change to School Teaching Act to include a hijab ban for pupils up to the age of 14 as well as for teachers; in Belgium, Halal slaughter ban was introduced; in Denmark, it became mandatory to shake public officials’ hands during citizenship ceremonies; in France, a bill to ensure so-called religious neutrality of persons contributing to the public service of education (i.e. banning headscarf in those services) was drafted by the Senate.
Besides the attempts of governments and political parties to implement legislations that directly target Muslims as religious subjects, mainstream media and private institutions are also responsible of spreading anti-Muslim feelings. In fact, one of the most striking examples of the normalization of Islamophobia in 2019 in Europe was the scandal around the Nobel Committee’s decision to award Peter Handke the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the Kosovo War, Handke expressed his wish to be “a Serbian-Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo.” In 2006, Handke gave a eulogy at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian dictator responsible for the genocides against Albanians and Bosnians in the 1990s.
The European Islamophobia Report2019 constitutes a precious source of knowledge for everybody – whether scholars or ordinary readers – interested in the development of racism and Islamophobia in Europe. Well-organized, complete and accessible, the EIR2019 also represents a useful and valuable tool for any activist or policymaker who aims to tackle Islamophobia in a decisive manner. Indeed, all 32 country reports included in this book do not only analyse the Islamophobia phenomena but also explore pro-active solutions from the civil society.
We hope this compendium of useful insights and data will provide European policy-makers and institutions valuable tools to tackle anti-Muslim racism in Europe seriously.
The 2019 European Islamophobia Report and previous years reports can be downloaded from www.islamophobiaeurope.com
For further information contact:
Enrique Tessieri, European Islamophobia Report Finland chapter author
+358 40 8400773
admin@nohatefinland.org
* Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland was founded in September 2018 and registered as an NGO the following month. The aim of the NGO is to tackle and eradicate hate crime and all forms of discrimination in Finland such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Afrophobia, misogyny, and other forms of social exclusion through education and training, seminars, events, conferences, among others.
Last week, the Finns Party (PS) in general and its MP Ano Turtiainen in particular got a taste of the #BlackLivesMatter phenomenon in Finland. Even if we consider expelling Turtiainen from the PS parliamentary group a good start, is it enough to rid the Islamophobic party of its racism problem?
Turtiainen has a shady history before he was elected to parliament last year. In 2018, he was convicted by a court for inciting violence against a Red Cross-managed asylum reception center, and in 2010 sentenced for assaulting a 14-year-old.
Turtiainen was quoted as saying in Mikkeli-based Länsi-Savo last year that he had no regrets about inciting people to commit acts of vandalism against the Red Cross. He stated that among the PS, such a conviction is a feather in one’s cap.
Apart from stating that Ebola is nature’s way of keeping down the population in Africa and other racist statements, the Tweet that broke the camel’s back was when he mocked George Floyd’s death.
The “joke?” George Floyd’s wide-eyed face full of terror colored purple with the name of the 1960s rock band “Pink Floyd.”
Cruel, racist, and unbecoming of an MP but that’s not all he tweets. Turtainen stated that as black people get more rights, they become more unruly. He suggested that slavery would be an effective way of keeping blacks in line.
If the PS knew of Turtiainen’s criminal record and his racist outbursts, why was he permitted to run for parliament for the party?
The answer is clear: The PS has a racism problem that it has no intention of correcting.
Populism and racism attract votes.
admin@nohatefinland.org
* Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland was founded in September 2018 and registered as an NGO the following month. The aim of the NGO is to tackle and eradicate hate crime and all forms of discrimination in Finland such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Afrophobia, misogyny, and other forms of social exclusion through education and training, seminars, events, conferences, among others.
Today we heard the tragic death of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn youth who died after two white Finns stabbed him at the Kannelmäki train station of Helsinki. The police have taken two suspects into custody. Investigations are ongoing.
The death of the young man, which is tragic and needless, brings a sense of DeJa’Vu concerning other similar crimes. Two that come to mind are the horrific events of Black February 2012, when three Muslims were killed in three weeks, a suicide, and a Finns Party councilman who offered to give a medal to a white Finn for killing one of these victims in cold blood.
The father of one of the victims wasn’t at all happy with how the police handled the case. He said that apart from not expressing any empathy for the parents’ grief, it was difficult to get any information from them about the crime.
“The police appeared to be more concerned about keeping the case under wraps because they feared a revenge attack by Somalis.
And then there was the brutal stabbing of a Pakistani migrant in February 2018 by three white youths.
Writes the Helsinki Times: “Assailants inflicted 20-30 stab wounds on the victim using knives and other edged weapons. His lips were also cut and was stabbed near the eye. Fortunately, the victim was transferred to the hospital urgently and underwent major surgery. Although still in ICU [intensive care unit] and in critical condition with severe injuries, his situation is not life-threatening anymore, and has regained consciousness.”
Much to the surprise of the victim and other NGOs following the case, no hate-crime charges were brought against the suspects. There was, however, a small consolation: the charges against the three youths were raised from suspected manslaughter to suspected murder.
An interesting matter to watch from the case is how long it will take for the police to determine if what happened was a hate crime or not.
admin@nohatefinland.org
* Anti-Hate Crime Organisation Finland was founded in September 2018 and registered as an NGO the following month. The aim of the NGO is to tackle and eradicate hate crime and all forms of discrimination in Finland such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Afrophobia, misogyny, and other forms of social exclusion through education and training, seminars, events, conferences, among others.
