On 26 March 2026, the Supreme Court of Finland delivered a criminal conviction to Dr Päivi Räsänen for being guilty of hate speech in agitating against a population group by making available to the public and keeping available to the public “opinions that insult homosexuals as a group on the basis of their sexual orientation.”
Ms Räsänen is not just any ordinary member of the Finnish public. She is a medical doctor, a Member of Parliament for the Christian Democrats and was Minister of the Interior between 2011 and 2015. She is also, however, a believing and practising Christian.
The decision of the Supreme Court has given rise to international controversy, with some describing it as an infringement of religious liberty and freedom of expression, while others have defended the decision as upholding human dignity, preventing the normalisation of opinions that, in the context of modern psychiatric opinion and equality laws, are considered to be either outdated or harmful or both, thus protecting vulnerable groups
How did we get here?
The saga has its origin in 2004 when Dr Räsänen published a 20+ page pamphlet detailing a biblical approach to human sexuality. In this pamphlet, she characterised homosexual relationships as being contrary to Christian teaching, and homosexuality itself as a disorder of psychosexual development.
In 2019, Dr Räsänen criticised her own Lutheran denomination in a tweet for sponsoring Helsinki Pride, attaching a photograph that included the following verses from Romans: “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. [Romans 1: 26-27]
Later in 2019, Dr Räsänen discussed related topics in a radio interview.
Let the trials begin!
In 2021, after complaints had been received, Dr Räsänen was prosecuted on three counts: (1) for making available and keeping available the 2004 pamphlet; (2) for her 2019 posts, principally the Romans tweet; and (3) for the radio interview.
The Helsinki District Court acquitted her of all charges. The prosecution appealed. The Helsinki Court of Appeal also unanimously acquitted her of all charges. The prosecution appealed once more, dropping charge (3) and this time, the Supreme Court, while unanimously acquitting Dr Räsänen on charge (2), voted 3-2 to convict her on charge (1) The Court held that the claim that homosexuality was a disorder of psychosexual development was factually incorrect and was not covered by freedom of religious expression when it was made publicly available.
Dr Räsänen has mooted the possibility of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR], saying, “I am taking legal advice on a possible appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. This is not about my free speech alone, but that of every person in Finland. A positive ruling would help to prevent other innocent people from experiencing the same ordeal for simply sharing their beliefs.”
A positive decision from the ECHR would indeed be welcome to defenders of free speech but given that the ECHR has already, in two cases with very similar fact patterns to that involving Dr Räsänen [Vejdeland et al. vs Sweden (2012) and Lilliendahl vs Iceland (2020)] upheld convictions, rejecting arguments that such convictions violated a. 10 (“Freedom of Expression”) of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the prospect of a successful appeal to the ECHR seems remote.
Defenders of the Supreme Court’s decision have been quick to deny that it was, in any essential way, a denial of religious freedom of expression. But is this so?
Speech (and human communication generally) may be regulated by a number of social forces, among them morality, manners, prudence and law. Of any actual or projected speech, we can ask: is it good to say it—this rules out lying, calumny and detraction; is it polite to say it—this rules out uncalled for rudeness, coarseness, and vulgarity; is it prudent or wise to say it-this rules out indiscretion and deliberate provocation; and finally, is it a crime or tort to say it—this rules out incitement, conspiracy (crime) and defamation (tort).
I would argue that the use of the criminal law to regulate speech is warranted only when that speech constitutes a genuine threat to inflict bodily harm on another. That being so, it seems quite extraordinary to criminalise what the Court characterised as an insult to a group without any evidence of actual bodily harm to that group or to its members, all the more so as the Court itself conceded that the conduct complained of contained no “incitement to violence or comparable threat-like fomenting of hatred.”
Despite this, and while granting that the conduct complained of was “not particularly serious in terms of the nature of the offence”, the Court was still willing to criminalise it! The Supreme Court’s decision, taken together with the long-drawn out process of what can only be described as prosecutorial persecution, cannot but have a chilling effect on the speech of anyone who might, not unreasonably, be averse to being dragged through the Courts, year after year
So, was the decision of the Finnish Supreme Court a restriction of religious liberty or not?
The case can be made—it is one that I would make—that what is exhibited in the Räsänen case is the transmutation of blasphemy from an offence that originally concerned itself with the denigration of Christian beliefs, practices and moral norms into a new form of blasphemy, secular blasphemy, that prohibits whatever might be perceived as being in any way a denigration of the dogmas of the new secular religion and its believers.
In the case under discussion, the Court’s decision may not have been a direct restriction on religious freedom of speech but it is certainly so in effect; after all, the pamphlet upon which the criminal conviction was based was entitled: “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexuality and the Challenge to the Christian Concept of Man,” and the view of human sexuality expounded in that pamphlet was primarily a religious one, albeit one bolstered by a medico-psychological judgement that was once widely accepted but which, it appears, is no longer acceptable to the secular establishment.
In any event, the relentless prosecution and eventual criminal conviction of Dr Räsänen by organs of the Finnish State, while obviously personally distressing to Dr Räsänen, will serve to reinforce the convictions of those of us who value freedom of speech that the introduction of Hate Speech laws, by whatever name they may be called, must be resisted and, where they are already in place, repealed.