Message center|The district court rejected some of the charges but convicted two journalists for revealing a security secret. All parties involved appealed to the Court of Appeal.
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The hearing of the Helsingin Sanomat Viestikoekeskus case will begin in the Helsinki Court of Appeal on Wednesday. All parties appealed the district judgment to the Court of Appeal.
The prosecutors still demand prison sentences for the accused, the accused deny the charges.
The District Court sentenced two journalists for revealing a security secret.
Former intelligence chief Harri Ohra-aho named as a new witness.
Helsingin Sanomat The hearing of the Viestikoekeskus case will begin in the Helsinki Court of Appeal on Wednesday. The former intelligence chief of the Defense Forces has been named as a new witness for the appeal hearing Harri Ohra-aho.
The prosecutors are still demanding prison sentences for the accused in the Court of Appeal. The defendants deny all charges.
The lawsuit concerns the article published by Helsingin Sanomat in December 2017 about the Defense Forces’ Communications Test Center and other military intelligence, as well as HS’s possible follow-up articles on the subject.
Both the prosecutors, the accused and the Defense Forces appealed against the previous district judgment to the Court of Appeal.
Helsinki in January of last year, the district court sentenced two journalists for revealing a security secret.
The district court held the reporter Tuomo Pietiläinä as the main responsible for the writing work of the HS Communication Center article. He was fined 50 days.
Journalist who participated in the writing work in a lesser role Laura Halminen was left unsentenced despite being guilty of the crime.
The third accused, who worked as a close representative Kalle Silfverberg acquitted of the charges. He was not considered to have participated in the disclosure of the secrets as a perpetrator or facilitator of the crime.
The District Court dismissed the charges against all three for attempting to reveal a security secret. These charges related to draft articles intended for later publication.
In the Court of Appeal mainly the same evidence is presented as in the district court. However, some new evidence is expected in the Court of Appeal.
Former intelligence chief Harri Ohra-ahon has been named as a new witness by journalist Laura Halminen.
Ohra-aho is to be heard about whether he knew beforehand the content of the story published by HS and whether he had discussed it with Halminen before publication. Ohra-aho was heard about the same matter in the preliminary investigation, but not in the district court.
Pietiläinen’s defense has brought to the court of appeals a couple of new written evidences about HS’s delivery processes.
Prosecutors are still demanding prison sentences for all three defendants in the Court of Appeal for the same crimes as in the district courts. Imprisonment sentences can be sentenced in the opinion of the prosecutors as conditional.
“There are no prior decisions regarding the disclosure of security matters. The sentencing sentence will show the guidelines for subsequent jurisprudence. The criminal sanction of the district court gives a wrong signal about the judicial system’s attitude towards Finland’s external security”, the prosecutors write in their appeal.
The defense forces agree with the demands of the prosecutors.
Helsinki Sanomat’s editor-in-chief Erja Yläjärvi says that no security secrets have been revealed in the HS case and it has not endangered Finland’s security.
“We approach the Court of Appeal proceedings calmly. This is an article published almost seven years ago, which already at the time of publication dealt with years-old issues. The communication test center has also been discontinued some time ago,” says Yläjärvi.
Journalists Halminen and Pietiläinen demand in the Court of Appeal that the sentences they received for revealing a security secret must be overturned.
Pietiläinen’s lawyer Timo Ylikantola points out that even though the district court convicted the journalists of revealing a security secret, the court did not consider all points presented by the prosecutors in the story as security secrets.
“The prosecutors have not appealed these points to the Court of Appeal, so we have already definitively won with regard to those points,” Ylikantola says.
He says that he trusts that the Court of Appeal will find that no crime has been committed regarding the remaining points.
Halminen and Pietiläinen’s defenses partly refer to the same issues in their appeals. According to the defense, the district court has considered information that is not actually a security secret.
“The situation in the district court was that the prosecutors claimed that certain information published in the case were security secrets. In principle, no other evidence was presented to support these claims than the Defense Forces’ opinion on the matter,” states Halminen’s complaint.
Pietiläinen’s defense also justifies the demand by saying, among other things, that he has not, as alleged in the indictment, disclosed or could not disclose any alleged secret information as a columnist.
In Pietiläinen’s opinion, the district court has wrongly assessed the origin of the published information. According to him, the information did not come from documents kept secret by the Defense Forces or is otherwise confidential information.
The appeal of the third accused Silfverberg concerns the reimbursement of legal costs.
Sanoma Media Finland, which publishes Helsingin Sanom, on the other hand, demands, among other things, that the order of the district court to remove the story published by HS from the internet be revoked.
According to the current schedule, evidence will be presented in the courtroom until November 18. After that, there will be final statements, but their exact date has not yet been agreed upon.
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