The Central Council of the Finnish Jewish Communities has submitted a complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman regarding the actions of the police authority.
Yaron Nadbornik, chairman of the Central Council of Jewish Congregations in Finland , says that since November 2024, demonstrations have been held almost daily in the immediate vicinity of the congregation center, in which kindergarten and school students and parishioners have been targeted with demonstrations that can be considered insulting and derogatory, causing great anxiety among parishioners, and especially harmful to children.
– Many parishioners also consider the demonstrations to be threatening and to significantly undermine their sense of security. As will be seen in more detail below, the demonstrations ostensibly appear to be related to the war between Israel and Hamas and the situation in Gaza. However, they are deliberately and almost exclusively targeted at individuals identified as or suspected of being members of the Jewish congregation (Jews), accusing them of the atrocities alleged in the slogans, Yaron Nadbornik writes in X.
The subject of the complaint is not the police’s conduct regarding the individual or criminal assessment of the protesters’ expressions of protest, although the Central Council believes that the consideration carried out by the police in this regard could justifiably be subject to quite severe criticism.
– The Central Council therefore wants to question the premise that Finnish citizens who are the target of protests should, in order to safeguard their constitutionally protected rights, always report offensive and threatening behavior to the police authorities for investigation by filing a criminal report in each individual case, and only after such a case-by-case assessment would the police authorities consider themselves entitled to take action in the matter.
– According to him, such a demand cannot be considered justified or reasonable even when it is a (partial) restriction of the freedom of assembly guaranteed in Section 13 of the Constitution, says Nadbornik.
According to him, the issue is about the fundamental rights of Finnish Jews and their implementation in a very concrete and unreasonable manner, affecting their everyday lives, where the aforementioned fundamental rights are in conflict with the right of demonstrators to demonstrate in a place of their choosing.
– By allowing the protests to continue in the immediate vicinity of the parish center for almost a year, despite their anti-Semitic and threatening content, the police authority has neglected to ensure the realization of the above-mentioned fundamental rights, Nadbornik states.
