Europe now treats Christian views as criminal

In what has become known as the ‘Bible trial’, Christian politician Päivi Räsänen was criminally convicted last week of ‘hate speech’ in Finland’s Supreme Court. Her successful prosecution was based on a 21-year-old church pamphlet, which simply re-stated Christian sexual ethics. The verdict, the culmination of a seven-year witch hunt carried out by Finnish authorities, is perhaps the clearest illustration yet of Europe’s censorship crisis.

The Finnish court found Räsänen guilty of ‘making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group’. Lutheran bishop Juhana Pohjola, who published the pamphlet, was convicted alongside her. Räsänen received a criminal record, an €1,800 fine and was even ordered to expunge the ‘offending’ passages from the internet. Incredibly, this effective persecution was carried out under the ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ section of Finland’s criminal code.

Räsänen’s case is yet further proof that hate-speech laws, along with being an attack on liberty, are internally incoherent, legally untenable and lead to manifestly absurd results. The 66-year-old politician faced three trials in Finland. She was unanimously acquitted in the first two, before losing the final case in a split decision, three judges to two. If three separate courts could not agree on what constitutes criminal ‘hate speech’, it’s clear that the category is too broad and subjective to have any coherent meaning. This is before we get to the main point: Räsänen has been criminalised for peacefully expressing her sincerely held Christian views. This is an intolerable assault on free speech and freedom of religion.

Last week’s judgement is the latest in a series of recent judicial assaults on freedom of expression in Europe. Even so, convicting a grandmother, who publicly states that, ‘Everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, is equal and of equal value’, is a new low.

The court acknowledged that Räsänen’s pamphlet ‘did not contain incitement to violence or comparable threat-like fomenting of hatred’ and found that her conduct was ‘not particularly serious in terms of the nature of the offence’. And yet she was still convicted – further proof that hate-speech laws are ultimately about repressing unfashionable views.

It’s not difficult to imagine a case similar to Räsänen’s occurring in the UK, where we have our own form of draconian hate-speech legislation, which is routinely used to stifle free speech. Indeed, the Public Order Act 1986 has been routinely used for such ends. In recent years, it has been used to justify a police investigation into British historian David Starkey as well as jailing Lucy Connelly for an intemperate social-media post she had made during the Southport riots.

Hate-speech laws give modern-day European states the power to criminalise dissent. As we have seen time and again, it is a power they wield mercilessly. Räsänen’s verdict underlines the necessity of repealing all such legislation in Finland, the UK and throughout Europe. The failure to do so will only see the continued erosion of the fundamental right to freedom of expression in our societies.

Lorcán Price is an Irish barrister and legal counsel for ADF International, which coordinated the legal defence of Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola. He testified about Europe’s free-speech crisis in the US Congress in February, alongside Räsänen.