Thanks to National Coalition Party (NCP) MP and chairperson of the constitutional committee, Heikki Vestman, Finland regressed to the days of the cold war, when human rights was seen as a negative matter because it jeopardized our relationship with the former Soviet Union.
Vestman, who has been accused of throwing the rule of law and human rights under the bus and allowing politics to taint the credibility of the constitutional committee, accuses Juha Lavapuro, who will begin his term as a member of the European Court of Human Rights, of undermining the rule of law because he criticized the pushback law passed in July.
Even if the law was passed in the summer, Syrian asylum seekers who crossed the Finnish-Russian border in November claim that Finnish border guards started to pushback asylum seekers in December 2023.
The Finnish Border Guards have not confirmed or denied such a claim because they do not comment on such claims.
Read the full story (in Finnish) here.
Lavapuro criticized Monday the constitutional committee and the pushback law in Helsingin Sanomat: “If you consult independent experts and make fun of their legal views by invoking national security, it is fair to say that the constitutional committee has stepped out of its constitutional role and into the political arena,” he was quoted as saying.
Vestman struck back at Lavapuro in a Helsingin Sanomat interview: “In general, I consider as harmful to the rule of law any speech that disputes the decision of a competent institution on the existing legal situation and the obligation to comply with it – whether it is made by a politician, judge, professor or ordinary citizen,” Vestman wrote on X.
Apart from his role in the constitutional committee and making possible the passage of the pushback law, Vestman has spoken lowly about asylum seekers.
Migrant Tales wrote about Vestman in 2021: “When I heard your speech [in parliament] and rationale Wednesday (20 October), I wondered how a young, apparently intelligent person could house such opinionated and unsubstantiated claims about migrants. If you are honest, would you want to [live and] grow up in a country where this type of discourse is ongoing by politicians seeking power and attention?
Read some history and check out how the Finns were labeled in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s.
Does the phrase “en finne igen” [a Finn again*] ring a bell?”
Apart from throwing human rights and the rule of law under the bus, Vestman also does it with asylum seekers.
*In the 1970s, any crime that was reported in the media was assumed to be done y a Finn. They say when reading about a crime, it was “a Finn again.”