Finland is set to speed up the deportation of criminal aliens after it emerged a 10-year-old girl was repeatedly raped and abused by migrant predators.
Commenting on the “shocking inhumanity” of the cases, President Sauli Niinistö said the country must “show strength” in punishing the rapists in order to “stigmatise the evil” of their actions so that Finland “can continue to have a just, safe society”.
Authorities in Oulu, a city and municipality in north-west Finland with just over 200,000 residents, on Wednesday announced that a total of 10 suspects had been arrested in connection with sexual abuse and violence carried out against three children under the age of 15 in the region.
All of the men taken into custody either entered the country as asylum seekers or were welcomed to Finland under refugee quota schemes, according to a press release from the Oulu Police Department.
Eight of the ten men — one of whom is still at large — have been accused of repeatedly raping a 10-year-old girl in their apartments over a period of several months, and of subjecting the child to beatings and violence after she was groomed on social media.
Police have subsequently advised parents and children to be on the lookout for migrant predators on the internet, with commissioner Markus Kiiskinen telling local media, “For young people, meeting a foreign-heritage man can happen spontaneously, for example during a party.
“Someone could offer them something ‘nice’, like tobacco or alcohol, which can start a nasty chain of events.”
Kai Mykkänen, the Minister of the Interior, recommended the country crack down on migrants accused of serious crimes after it emerged that a number of the suspects had been granted citizenship.
“Things like these shouldn’t be happening in Finland,” he said, speaking on YLE’s A-Studio earlier this week, as it reported figures revealing foreign nationals were heavily overrepresented in the country’s rape cases.
“There are, of course, some Finnish people who commit terrible rapes … But the fact is that foreigners are much more likely [to be] suspects and this must not be brushed under the carpet,” he told the public broadcaster.
Highlighting legislative amendments to speed up deportation of criminal migrants, which were approved by the government last month, Mykkänen added that the asylum system is not doing its job if authorities are unable to remove individuals whose claims are rejected, or even migrants suspected of committing serious crimes.
Legal appeals “are currently lodged against practically all criminal removal orders”, delaying enforceable deportation rulings from several months to several years, according to local media, which reports that the amendments agreed last month would significantly crack down on the appeals tactic in cases of individuals found guilty of serious criminal offences.
Finland has accepted large numbers of third world migrants in recent years under not only the EU’s controversial quota scheme, which redistributes migrants who entered Europe illegally from frontline countries such as Greece across other countries in the bloc, but also through a UN “transfer” programme.
Finland announced last December it would ship another 750 migrants into the country directly from Africa and the Middle East under the programme heavily pushed by the European Commission, which spends huge sums of European taxpayers’ cash on importing “transfer refugees”.