Last week, a Finnish politician faced a criminal trial before her country’s Supreme Court for peacefully expressing her Christian views online.
Päivi Räsänen, who has been an MP for more than 25 years, is the face of Europe’s free speech crisis.
Dr Räsänen is accused of “hate speech” for posting a tweet in 2019, alongside a picture of Bible text and for writing a church pamphlet, published in 2004, which outlined Christian views on marriage and sexuality. The tweet simply questioned whether it was appropriate for her church to sponsor a Pride parade. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola also faced trial alongside Dr Räsänen for publishing the pamphlet.
Despite being unanimously acquitted in two prior trials, the Finnish state prosecutor appealed this case to the highest court in Finland. Dr Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola, whose legal defence is coordinated by ADF International, have now faced over six years of criminal prosecution merely for expressing views that Christians have held for over 2,000 years.
This culminated in the prosecution last Thursday calling for Dr Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola to be convicted for “incitement against a group”, for thousands of euros of fines to be imposed, and for Räsänen’s tweet and pamphlet to be censored from the internet.
As well as setting a precedent for free speech across Europe, the case also exemplifies a broader trend of Western elites seeking to censor viewpoints they object to online, in the name of tackling so-called “hate speech” and “mis” and “disinformation”.
Dr Räsänen’s case has garnered international attention, including, in a rare move, with the US State Department recently expressing concern over her prosecution.
In response to last week’s trial, the US Congress’ House Judiciary Committee also said: “Europe wants to censor Christians and label the Bible ‘hate speech.’ Any effort to export European censorship to America must be stopped.”
The exporting of European censorship is not an imagined danger — the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) threatens to do just that. Adopted in 2022, the law introduces a lowest common denominator for censorship across the EU, where the most draconian anti-free speech legislation in any individual member country now applies across the bloc.
Under the act, online platforms must remove so-called “hate speech” or face massive fines of up to 6 per cent of global annual turnover. Dr Räsänen’s case shows that even referencing the Bible could be censored under this standard.
But this is not merely an issue for the EU. The US Ambassador to the EU, House Judiciary Committee and big tech platforms Google and X have expressed concern over the potential of global online censorship under the DSA. This is due to the threat of worldwide content takedown orders and pressure faced by platforms to modify their global content moderation policies to comply with the DSA’s restrictive standards.
The Online Safety Act poses threats similar to the DSA, to online freedom of expression in the UK. There are over 12,000 arrests per year for “offensive” online messages in Great Britain, and the free speech crisis in the country is so severe that it’s not difficult to imagine a case like Dr Räsänen’s occurring in the UK in the future too, if the country continues on its current trajectory.
It’s clear that across Europe and the UK, there’s an increased effort by authorities to control online discourse within narrowly defined limits. The years-long prosecution of Dr Räsänen shows that in our age, those who dissent from socially liberal orthodoxies risk being targeted by the state, with its tremendous power and resources, so that even if one is eventually acquitted, the process becomes the punishment.
But Dr Räsänen will not be deterred. “I stand here not only to defend my own right to speak freely, but to defend the freedom of every person to express deeply held beliefs without fear of punishment,” she commented last week.
All those who oppose technocratic control of our societies and support the basic freedoms that are necessary for a democracy to flourish should stand with her.
