Finland | HCRW

Finland regularly reports hate crime data to ODIHR. Finland has conducted victimization surveys to measure unreported hate crimes. The Finnish police closely co-operates with the Finnish Human Rights League, the Finnish Red Cross and Finnish Victim Support to develop a co-ordinated response to combat hate crimes. These organizations, along with the national police and other key authorities, form a network tasked by Finland's Ministry of Justice with monitoring hate crimes in Finland and developing adequate measures to prevent such crimes. Finland implemented ODIHR's Training Against Hate Crimes for Law Enforcement (TAHCLE) programme in 2017 and went on to train over 1,000 police officers on hate crimes before integrating the programme's hate crime modules into pre- and in-service training for police.

SELECT YEAR

Download the 2020 hate crime report for Finland

OFFICIAL DATA REPORTED BY STATES

Year	Hate crimes recorded by police	Prosecuted	Sentenced
2023	1,361	49	48
2022	1,094	121	27
2021	1,390	44	30
2020	1177	48	42
2019	900	22	17
2018	880	55	21
2017	1497	63	37
2016	1311	N/A	N/A
2015	1704	Not available	Not available
2014	954	Not available	Not available
2013	904	Not available	Not available
2012	836	38	12
2011	1418	29	12
2010	1407	38	Not available
2009	1580	41	Not available

About 2020 Data

The police also recorded criminal forms of intolerance other than hate crimes, such as defamation and criminal discrimination. These data are reported to ODIHR but are not included in the overall figure or in the breakdown below.

Hate crime recorded by police

Beyond this data breakdown, a further 407 cases of defamation and discrimination were reported to ODIHR. These do not fall under the OSCE definition of hate crime and are thus not included. With the consent of the Roma community, hate crime against Roma people has been included as a category separate from Racism and Xenophobia.

By bias motivation
By type of crime

Download official data

National developments

In 2020, a shadow report on victims’ experiences of hate crimes was published as part of the project "Against Hate", funded by the European Commission’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (REC) and co-ordinated by the Ministry of Justice. The aim of the report was to bring the perspectives of the victims into the discourse on hate crimes. Unlike the report on hate crimes carried out by the Police University College, this report sought out qualitative rather than statistical data, and the main focus was on the experiences and needs of the victims.

Furthermore, in December 2019, the Ministry of Justice launched a two-year REC-funded project entitled “Facts Against Hate” coordinated by the Ministry of Justice, with the project partners being the Ministry of the Interior, the Police University College, and the following civil society organizations: Anti-Racist Forum (Finland), the Centre for Peace Studies (Croatia), and INAR (Ireland). The objective of the project is to improve the effectiveness of work against hate crimes and hate speech. The project is aimed at, among other things, developing data collection, hate crime reporting and local cooperation practices. It has so far produced material and organised trainings, e.g. virtual mandatory training for all police officers. As part of the Facts against Hate project, the Police University College and the Ministry of Justice will look into all of the recorded hate crimes in 2017 and follow them manually throughout the whole process from police involvement to prosecution and courts. The preliminary results indicate that there are huge shortcomings in this regard. The report will be published at the end of 2021.

The Ministry of Justice also started working on the amendments to the Criminal Code whereby gender would be added among the motives that constitute grounds for increasing the punishment of (any) crime as specified in chapter 6, section 5 of the Criminal Code. The Finnish government’s proposal was introduced to the Parliament in February 2021.

KEY OBSERVATION

ODIHR recognizes Finland's efforts to improve its hate crime recording, data collection mechanisms, and local cooperation practices, as well as the submitted information on police records. However, based on the available information, ODIHR observes that Finland would benefit from raising the awareness and building the capacity of its criminal justice officials about hate crimes.

ODIHR recalls that in the Ministerial Council Decision 9/09, participating States have committed to introducing or further developing professional training and capacity-building activities for law-enforcement, prosecution, and judicial officials dealing with hate crimes. ODIHR stands ready to support Finland in meeting its relevant commitments through the provision of comprehensive resources and tailored capacity building assistance for police, prosecution, and judiciary.

Our methodology

In addition to incidents summarized below, this graph includes 2 hate incidents reported by Kantor Center as statistics.

Anti-Semitic hate crime

Date	Type of incident	Source	Description
2020-01	Attacks against property	OIDAC	Show info

Anti-Christian hate crime

Date	Type of incident	Source	Description
2020-01	Attacks against property	OIDAC	Show info

INTERNATIONAL REPORTS

No information is available.