UK Bars Finnish Christian MP Päivi Räsänen From Entering the Country| National Catholic Register

 LONDON — A Finnish Christian parliamentarian has been barred from entering the United Kingdom following her conviction by Finland’s Supreme Court for calling homosexuality a “sexual deviation” and an “aberration.” 

In July, the U.K. government informed Päivi Räsänen, a long-serving Christian Democrat politician, that her Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) had been denied, after initially approving it in June. 

Räsänen had been due to travel to Northern Ireland to address a conference on religious freedom and free speech on Wednesday and Friday this week, but she will now have to contribute virtually. 

Her ban from entry into Northern Ireland follows the U.K. government’s refusal to allow a number of other high-profile figures to visit the country over the past year, often on grounds of what it deems to be “hate speech.” 

After her ETA was canceled, Räsänen applied for a full visa and wrote to the U.K.’s home secretary personally to ask that it be granted ahead of the conference, but she did not receive a reply and was told not to expect a response before the event. 

Räsänen’s blocked entry to the U.K. comes after Finland’s Supreme Court convicted her in March 2026 for expressing her Christian beliefs on marriage and human sexuality in a 2004 booklet titled Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relationships Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity.

The Supreme Court held that passages calling homosexuality an “aberration of psychosexual development” and a “sexual deviation” were derogatory toward homosexual people as a group on grounds of sexual orientation. The views expressed in the book reflect Christian sexual ethics, namely, that marriage is between a man and a woman and that same-sex sexual acts are sinful.

Court Conviction

The court convicted not only Räsänen, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, but also Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola, who co-wrote the booklet, and the Luther Foundation Finland, which published it. The court fined them all and ordered that the relevant passages be removed. Regarding a separate charge, the court acquitted Räsänen for 2019 social-media comments criticizing the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for sponsoring the Helsinki “pride” event. 

Räsänen, Pohjola and the Luther Foundation have now taken their cases to the European Court of Human Rights, aided by the free-speech legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

“It is shocking that the UK has blocked me, a democratically elected politician in an allied European state, from entering the country,” Räsänen told ADF.

“I was convicted of ‘hate speech’ in Finland for peacefully expressing my Christian views,” she said. “This was an egregious case of state censorship, noted with concern by observers around the world, including the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission.”

Räsänen added that “even though this unjust conviction is currently on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, the U.K. has likely refused me travel authorisation on this basis. In doing so, the U.K. is punishing me for exercising my fundamental human rights.”

Under U.K. law, the home secretary may exclude a foreign national if it is believed that admitting them is “not conducive to the public good”— that is, undesirable because they pose a threat to U.K. society. The policy is normally reserved in the interests of national security, such as extremism or serious crime, but can be applied to “unacceptable behavior” in the form of speech, publication, preaching, websites or a position of influence that “fosters hatred” that might lead to inter-community violence in the U.K. 

ADF legal counsel Lorcán Price, who is representing Räsänen, Pohjola and the Luther Foundation Finland at the appeal, said that “in essence” the Finnish parliamentarian was blocked from entering the U.K. “for peacefully expressing her Christian beliefs.” 

“This is not an isolated incident,” he added. “The U.K. has in the last year blocked a number of mainstream conservative individuals, politicians.” 

He was referring to public figures such as Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who was denied an ETA in January and told that she had to apply for a visa instead. A Dutch conservative activist who shared her reasons for becoming a Catholic with the Register in 2023, Vlaardingerbroek was notified of the ban just days after she had accused Britian’s then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer of allowing “the ongoing rape and killing of British girls by migrant rape gangs” and criticized him for threatening to block X in the name of “safety.”

Another recently barred public figure has been Dominik Tarczyński, a conservative Polish Member of the European Parliament who supports a “zero illegal migration” policy,  who was denied entry to the U.K. in May. He was due to speak at a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London led by British nationalist Tommy Robinson. “This is what communism looks like in the 21st century,” he said in response to the ban.

The U.K. government also canceled the ETA of other public figures who were due to attend the Robinson rally, such as Filip Dewinter, a conservative Flemish parliamentarian, conservative U.S. commentator Joey Mannarino, and Chilean-born “MAGA influencer” Valentina Gómez. 

‘Outstanding Witness’

Responding to the barring of Räsänen, Father Benedict Kiely, a British priest whose charity Nasarean.org supports persecuted Christians, said he had “had the privilege of meeting Päivi,” whom he described as “a woman of faith and an outstanding witness under the persecution of the secular left.” 

He told the Register Aug. 19: “The action of the government is scandalous. It seems only Christians and conservatives are unwelcome in Britain. The Church should be vocal about the erosion of free speech in Britain. At the moment, it seems very silent.”

The Register asked Archbishop Richard Moth of Westminster and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales if they would like to comment on the barring of Räsänen and other public Christian figures from entering the U.K. The bishops’ conference advised contacting the Lutheran Church in the U.K. Archbishop Moth’s office did not respond by press time.  

In his address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See in January, Pope Leo XIV warned against such curbs on free speech. “It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking,” he said. “At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “this leads to other consequences that end up restricting fundamental human rights, starting with the freedom of conscience.”