The Finnish racist Mikko Ellilä has been ordered to pay a fine and remove some of his blog postings from the Internet, this one in particular. The court found that Ellilä had intentionally denigrated people of African descent. I would say that the court is right about that, but I hadn’t realised this was illegal. Time to face facts: freedom of speech doesn’t exist in Finland. Not like it does, say, in the US.
edit: here’s the court transcript. I think Ellilä defends himself pretty well. The prosecutor is shocking: he hardly refers to law at all, but instead gets into a debate with Ellilä about the truth value of the claims in the blog post. His strategy is to pompously point out the unpleasantness of Ellilä’s ideas, trusting this to be enough to bring about a conviction – and it was.
another edit: it appears that Ellilä doesn’t self-identify as a racist but as an individualist. Duly noted.
