Mäenpää was invited to the festival, so the situation is not the same as removing a paying customer from an event.
Basic Finns Congressman Juha Mäenpään a request for an investigation into the activities of the Province will hardly result in a verdict, the professor of criminal law estimates.
Mäenpää filed an investigation request with the police, because he was removed from the Provinssi festival after the organizer canceled his guest ticket. The province justified the cancellation of the invitation by saying that the opinions expressed by Mäenpää in his recent column about gender diversity did not correspond to the values of the festival.
Mäenpää does not specify which crime he thinks the organizer of the Province may have committed.
Criminal law professor Kimmo Nuotio The University of Helsinki estimates that the case is on a very fragile foundation.
“His freedom of speech has not been taken away because the publication of the opinion piece has not been prevented,” Nuotio sums up.
Removing Mäenpää from festivals could be the closest thing to a discrimination crime, Nuotio estimates.
What makes the situation peculiar is that Mäenpää was in Provinss as an invitee, and not as a paying customer. Nuotio says that canceling the invitation ticket is up to the sender of the invitation to evaluate himself.
“But if he had been completely rejected as a customer, then it could possibly have been discrimination,” Nuotio estimates.
Law guarantees that everyone has equal access as customers to restaurants or, for example, to festivals.
Discrimination is, for example, denying a service on the basis of ethnic origin, age, sexual orientation or other characteristics. People must not be discriminated against because of social opinion either.
“This is a remarkable situation, because the idea of the anti-discrimination law is to promote equality and equality. Mäenpää’s opinion, on the other hand, has been against equality, and now the same equality law is invoked, which his opinion violates,” says Nuotio.
However, according to Nuotio, the protection provided by the prohibition of discrimination is not mechanical and exceptions can be made to it. The Province may have had an acceptable reason to remove Mäenpää from the festivals, because his strong opinion is blatantly against the declared values of the Province.
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