In Finland, censorship is not censorship

The saga of Matti Nikki's anti-child pornography website, http://lapsiporno.info, continues. I wrote about it for the first time last year; to sum up, Nikki runs a website dedicated to criticizing the way the Finnish government and most European countries are handling the problem of child pornography. Nikki's view is that no real action is being taken to stop it, and all anti-child pornography measures being taken here are ineffective.

When Finland enacted a law that permits the police to block access to foreign websites containing child pornography, they blocked access to Nikki's site. It isn't a foreign site and doesn't contain child pornography, but censored it remains.

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At the end of May, the Finnish courts and justice ombudsman both decided that Nikki has no grounds for complaint and that his case will not be tried in the second tier of Finnish courts. The view of the official bodies involved is that the decision of the Finnish police to censor a website is an administrative decision by the police, and is not subject to judicial review.

The Finnish constitution is generally held to forbid censorship. However, the justice ombudsman has, in his wisdom, ruled that in this case, censorship is not censorship. Therefore the law is not unconstitutional, basically because they say it isn't.

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Electronic Frontier Finland is taking the case to the Finnish supreme court (their press release, in Finnish, here); I applaud their efforts, but they are in vain. The Finnish courts routinely ignore the Constitution, which quite simply has no force in Finnish law or practice.

As it stands at the moment, the Finnish police can block access to any Internet page on the World Wide Web. We now basically have a court decision that says the police can, under the law that provides for blocking foreign websites that contain child pornography, block a foreign or domestic website that either does or does not contain child pornography. That is to say, any website on the World Wide Web. And anyone whose website is blocked will not even be informed, and cannot file a complaint.

This is not a free country.