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.
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.
The figures presented here cover the following grounds: race/colour, ethnicity/national origin, citizenship and language.
This category also includes hate crimes committed among Shia and Sunni Muslims.
Official data for hate crimes motivated by bias against lesbian, gay and bisexual people (43 hate crimes) and by bias against transgender people (11 hate crimes) were reported separately, but are presented together here.
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.
In addition to incidents summarized below, this graph includes 2 hate incidents reported by Kantor Center as statistics.