Convicted Over a 2004 Church Booklet, She Is Not Backing Down

A Finnish grandmother of twelve has been fighting her own government in court for almost seven years.

Her crime, according to a divided Finnish Supreme Court, was a booklet she wrote for her church back in 2004. The subject was marriage and sexuality, written from a plain Christian view.

Now Päivi Räsänen is taking the fight to Europe.

ADF International reported that on May 7, 2026, Räsänen announced she will appeal her conviction to the European Court of Human Rights. It is the last stop in a case that should never have started.

READ: "I know I am not alone in facing unjust persecution under ‘hate speech’ laws that make sharing Christian beliefs a criminal offense. I make my appeal in the hope that the European Court of Human Rights will recognise that peacefully expressing one's beliefs is never a…

— Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) May 7, 2026

ADF International explained the appeal and the conviction this way:

Finnish Parliamentarian Convicted of “Insulting” a Group for 20-year-old Church Booklet to Appeal to European Court of Human Rights Päivi Räsänen announces intention to appeal to Europe’s top human rights court following criminal conviction by Finnish Supreme Court for a decades-old church booklet expressing her beliefs on marriage and sexuality ADF International to represent Räsänen in landmark case for free speech across Europe HELSINKI (7 May 2026), A longstanding Finnish parliamentarian criminally convicted in March for “insulting” a group by her country’s Supreme Court has announced that she will appeal her case to the European Court of Human Rights, in the final legal juncture for this critical case for free speech in Europe. Päivi Räsänen was found guilty for expressing her beliefs about marriage and sexuality in a booklet she wrote for her church over 20 years ago.

Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola and the Luther Foundation Finland were also convicted for publishing the booklet for the church.

They were criminally convicted under Finland’s 2011 “hate speech” law which prohibits “agitation against a minority group” under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. The appeal comes after the former Interior Minister’s nearly seven-year prosecution and unanimous acquittal by two lower courts in Finland.

In March 2026, a mixed Supreme Court ruling acquitted Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet, but convicted her and Bishop Pohjola for “making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group”

Räsänen is not some fringe figure. She is a longtime member of Finland’s parliament, a medical doctor, and a former Minister of the Interior.

She was charged under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Read that again.

A church pamphlet about Christian teaching got slotted under the same heading as actual atrocities.

Here is the legal history, because it tells you how flimsy this always was.

Two lower courts unanimously acquitted her on every charge, once in 2022 and again in 2023. The state prosecutor refused to let it go and appealed up to the Supreme Court.

In March 2026, the Supreme Court split the difference in a way that satisfied nobody. The justices unanimously upheld her acquittal for a 2019 tweet that quoted a Bible verse.

Then, by a narrow 3 to 2 vote, they convicted her and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola for the old booklet.

ADF International laid out the timeline and the stakes.

Look at the logic the court used to convict her, and it gets stranger.

The booklet was published in 2004. The hate speech law came in 2011, years later.

Retroactive punishment for peaceful church teaching should alarm anyone who cares about basic civil liberty.

The court’s workaround was that Räsänen kept sharing the booklet online after the investigation began in 2019. So a document that was legal when she wrote it became a crime once she refused to delete it.

Even the justices admitted the booklet was not dangerous.

So it was not violent, not threatening, not particularly serious. And they convicted her anyway, slapped her with fines worth thousands of euros, and ordered the offending words “removed from public access and destroyed.”

That last part should bother anyone who claims to value free expression. A European court ordered Christian writing destroyed.

Räsänen explained why she is appealing in her own words, and she framed it as a duty rather than a personal grievance.

She knows she is not the only one in the crosshairs.

Hate speech laws sound tidy on paper. In practice they hand prosecutors a vague club to swing at people whose views they dislike, and the people swinging it always seem to know which direction they want it to land.

Räsänen put it bluntly when she described the wider pattern.

ADF International will represent her in the European appeal. They are treating it as a landmark test for religious speech across the continent, and it is hard to argue otherwise.

Think about what a conviction here actually establishes. If a sitting lawmaker can be dragged through seven years of prosecution for a church pamphlet, the average believer in the pew has no protection at all.

The Christian belief that drew all this fire is not exotic. It is what the church has taught for two thousand years.

Räsänen never called for harm. She cited Scripture and stated what her faith holds.

That used to be the baseline definition of protected speech in a free society.

Finland still calls itself free. So does the rest of Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights now gets to decide whether those words still mean anything when a Christian says something the prosecutors find uncomfortable. For Räsänen, after nearly seven years, the answer is finally close.

What do you think the court should do, and would you have kept fighting this long? Drop your thoughts in the comments.