A court in Helsinki, Finland on Monday dismissed an indictment against five men criminally charged with incitement against an ethnic group for organizing the display of Nazi flags at an Independence Day parade in 2018.
Three of the defendants had been charged with carrying swastika flags during the neo-Nazi “Kohti vapautta” (“Toward freedom”) demonstration in Helsinki in December 2018, while a fourth defendant had been charged due to organizing the demonstration, and a fifth charged for helping to carry the flags, reported the yle.fi news site.
The judge ruled that while the swastika flags were linked to Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and other atrocities, the act of displaying a swastika was not enough to meet the legal threshold to be guilty of incitement against an ethnic group, which would need to involve threatening or insulting a group of people based on ethnicity or religion.
The court also threw out charges of interfering with authorities. Four of the defendants had attempted to prevent police from taking the flags. The court ruled that the police did not have the legal right to block the marchers' freedom of assembly.
One of the defendants was fined for incitement against an ethnic group for a separate incident in which he was found guilty of uttering a threatening speech near a school. The woman who recorded his speech and placed it online was also fined.
The display of the swastika is not against the law in Finland as it is in some European countries, such as Germany.
State prosecutor Raija Toiviainen said that she was going take the decision to the Court of Appeal.
"I thought this would have been a clearer thing, but I see now that this requires reflection. In my opinion, the charges were justified. I have to take some time to examine the court's decision," Toiviainen said, according to yle.fi.