#EU #Finland / #UK – Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen was blocked from entering the United Kingdom to speak in person at a religious liberty conference in Northern Ireland this week, after her Electronic Travel Authorization was cancelled following a Finnish Supreme Court conviction earlier in the year.
Räsänen, a long-serving Christian Democrat member of the Finnish Parliament and former interior minister, had been invited to address a conference linked to the Bangor Worldwide Missionary Convention on topics including freedom of speech and religion. The event took place in Northern Ireland in mid-to-late August 2026. She planned to speak in person on Wednesday and Friday but was forced to participate virtually instead.
Her Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) for the UK was initially approved in June 2026. In July, UK authorities cancelled it, citing information she had provided in her application. Räsänen had disclosed her recent criminal conviction, as required. She then applied for a full visitor visa and wrote personally to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood seeking urgent approval so she could attend. The visa was eventually granted on the evening of Friday 21 August 2026—too late for her to travel—and she delivered her remarks remotely from Finland.
The travel restriction stemmed from a March 2026 ruling by Finland’s Supreme Court. In a narrow 3-2 decision, the court convicted Räsänen (and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola) of agitation against a population group under Finnish hate-speech provisions. The conviction related to statements in a 2004 church booklet she authored, titled Male and Female He Created Them, which expressed traditional Christian views on marriage and sexuality, including descriptions of homosexuality that the court found insulting to homosexuals as a group. The court imposed a fine equivalent to 20 day-fines (around €1,800) and ordered the removal of certain passages from public access. It unanimously acquitted her on a separate charge involving a 2019 social-media post that quoted Bible verses criticizing her church’s involvement with a Pride event.
Lower courts had previously acquitted Räsänen and Pohjola unanimously. The case, which began after the 2019 tweet and spanned years of police investigations and trials, drew international attention as a test of free speech and religious expression. Räsänen and her supporters, including Alliance Defending Freedom International, which provided legal support, described the conviction as an unjust restriction on peaceful expression of Christian beliefs and filed an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament’s Friends of the United Kingdom group, called the UK decision shocking and ironic. She noted that she had been barred from entering the country of an allied European democracy to discuss fundamental freedoms precisely because of her Finnish conviction for expressing those views. Bishop Pohjola was also denied entry clearance. Some Northern Ireland MLAs had separately criticised her invitation and called for her to be deplatformed over her biblical positions on sexual ethics.
By the time her UK visa was approved, the conference appearances had already taken place online. Räsänen expressed gratitude for the eventual visa approval, which would allow future travel to the UK, while reiterating her view that the original ETA cancellation should never have occurred.
Cover Image: Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen
