Executive summary

• Author: Hiltunen, Rainer
• Pages: 5-12

5

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Introduction

Until the end of the 1980s, Finland was one of the most culturally homogeneous

countries in Europe. The number of immigrants was minimal. There was a major shift

from emigration to immigration in the 1990s, with the number of foreign citizens growing

from 26 300 in 1990 to 168 000 in 2010. Currently some 7 % of the total population of

5.5 million were born outside Finland.1

Finland is home to a number of national minorities, such as the Roma (10 000 people),

Jewish, Tatar and Russian minorities, as well as the indigenous Sámi people (9 000). In

addition to the traditional Finnish Roma minority, some 500 Roma people come annually

from Romania and Bulgaria to visit Finland. Their social and economic standing is much

worse than the Finnish Roma minority, who have been able to maintain much of their

cultural traditions, such as Roma clothing and the Romani language.

Religious diversity in Finland has increased during the past 20 years, as the size of

Islamic communities has grown from 30 000 to 60 000 people, due to the arrival of

immigrants from Muslim countries. Their percentage of the population is still less than

1 %. At present, 70 % of the population belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Other religious groups are considerably smaller, the next largest community being the

Russian Orthodox Church (1 %). Around 27 % of the population do not belong to any

religious community.2

There has been a considerable change in attitudes towards sexual orientation:

homosexuality was penalised in criminal law until 1971; discrimination on the basis of

sexual orientation was prohibited in 1995; and in 2001, the Registered Partnerships Act

guaranteed registered same-sex couples a status almost equal to marriage, but without

the ability to take a joint family name and to adopt together. Same-sex couples were

finally allowed to marry and adopt together in 2017. The Lutheran church has also

accepted ministers who are homosexual or transsexual.

The proportion of population aged 65 and older in Finland is third highest (21.8 %) of all

EU countries.3 It is generally accepted that age discrimination exists in Finland. In one

survey, 18 % of respondents reported having been discriminated against in recruitment

because of their age and 12 % reported having been discriminated against during

employment because of their age.4 However, there have been only a few court cases

dealing with age discrimination.

For people with disabilities, the legal and political focus has remained on the specific

services that people with disabilities need, i.e. on the traditional social policy approach,

but not so much on equal treatment. However, the focus is gradually shifting towards a

more equal rights-based approach, which has been strengthened by the renewal of the

Non-Discrimination Act in 2015 and the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of

Persons with Disabilities and the Optional Protocol in 2016.

NGOs representing different discrimination grounds have been cooperating well in their

work against discrimination for several years.

1 http://www.stat.fi/tup/maahanmuutto/index.html.

2 https://www.tilastokeskus.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_vaesto.html.

3 Eurostat (2019),

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1&pcode=tps00028&language=en&toolbox

=sort.

4 Taloustutkimus (2018) ‘Age discrimination in employment’ (Ikäsyrjintä työelämässä) , available at:

https://docplayer.fi/104753668-Tutkimusraportti-ikasyrjinta-tyoelamassa.html.