FINLAND: Four Finnish Conscientious objectors sentenced to imprisonment

On November 15th total objector Antti Rautiainen (FIN11366) has been sent to Vantaa prison to serve a sentence of 15 days for refusing to attend callups.
Rautiainen has consistently refused to attend every time he has been called up since November 1997. Since then he has been called up altogether 20 times. On 20th of August 2001 WRI issued a co-alert on Rautiainen.
Ruatianen has spent most of the past 8 year with a warrant of apprehension. Almost every time he has to deal with the police or the customs officials he is given a fine (proportional regarding his income, usually 90-120 euros) and a new call-up date is set.
Out of principle he refuses the fines and therefor the fines are transformed into imprisonment of 7-10 days for each call-ups.
Before this, Rautiainen has spent 2 month in prison in June- September 2001. There is no end in sight for the reconviction cycle.

Johannes Aalto (FIN14774) received an unconditional prison sentence of 197 days. He was charged of "civilian service crime" and he hadn't done any military or alternative service before his refusal. On the same occasion an unconditional prison sentence was passed to two other total objectors who had broken off their alternative service. One of them got 180 days, the other- who had only 20 days of his service time left- 10 days.
Aalto sent a proclamation of his total objection to civilian service authorities on June 2005. He mentioned the punitive length of civilian service and its discriminative nature if compared to Jehova's Witnesses (who are exempted from all service during peace time) as special reasons for his objection. During the year 2004 71 Finnish total objectors were sentenced to prison. Finnish Union of CO's estimates that the number will be on a similar level also this year.

War Resisters' International calls for letters of protest to Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, or Finnish embassies abroad. A protest email can be sent at http://wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20051117a.html. A list of Finnish embassies can be found at http://formin.finland.fi/doc/eng/missions/embcount.html.

Andreas Speck
War Resisters' International

Archives of co-alert can be found at http://wri-irg.org/news/alerts