The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stands in solidarity with the Muslims of Finland and condemns the Finnish Supreme Court’s decision allowing the police to forcibly remove the hijab, in light of the incident of the Finnish police removing the hijab of two asylum seekers in 2017.
In a statement issued by the Council, the largest civil rights and Muslim advocacy organization in the country, it said that forcing Muslim women to remove their hijab against their will is a flagrant violation of religious freedom, human dignity, and the sanctity of the body.
The Council finds it disappointing that Finland's highest court has sanctioned the use of physical force against vulnerable individuals seeking safety, instead of requiring law enforcement agencies to adopt reasonable measures that respect religious beliefs while meeting administrative requirements for identity verification.
The Supreme Court in Finland had ruled that the police had legal justifications for using force to remove the veil of two asylum seekers, thus ending the course of a case that began at the Hämeenlinna police station in 2017, according to the Helsinki Times newspaper.
In the ruling issued on September 22, 2026, the court rejected the criminal charges against the police officers and guards.
The story began in 2017 when two women were in the process of applying for asylum when the police informed them of the necessity of taking registration photos without a head covering. The police told the two women that only female employees would be present during the filming process, but the two women refused and asked to take the photos at another police station, where they had previously had registration photos taken of them wearing a head covering, according to the Helsinki Times newspaper.
The officers refused, and sought directions from a high-ranking official, who ordered that photos be taken without a head covering, and gave the officers the right to use the minimum necessary force if the two women showed resistance. As the two women continued to refuse, the situation escalated.
The officers decided to separate the two women from each other, and when one of them resisted an order to leave the recording room, she was led into a corridor while the officers held her wrists. She resisted and tried to return to the room.
As for the other woman, she resisted inside the room, and the officers grabbed her arms and pinned her to the wall, then they forcefully sat her down and removed her head covering, and her photo was taken while the employees were holding her shoulder and upper arm, and then the second woman was returned to the room and her arms were held while her photo was taken as well.
According to the Finnish Public Broadcasting Corporation, the two women filed a lawsuit against the police for using violence during the filming process.
The public prosecutor charged the officers with breach of duty and assault, and the high-ranking official who allowed the officers to use minimal force was charged with incitement to assault.
The Kanta-Hame District Court dismissed these charges in 2022, and the Turku Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in March 2024, according to the Helsinki Times.
The Supreme Court based its ruling on Finnish law, as taking photos is an essential part of the procedures for registering asylum applications, and Finnish law allows the police to take photos and collect other information related to asylum seekers for the purposes of verifying identity.
Although the legislation does not specify in detail how to take photographs, national police directives at the time required officers to photograph people without wearing religious or cultural head coverings, taking into account religious practices during the photographing process.
The court also relied on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights regarding requirements to appear without religious head coverings in photographs used for official documents.
As for the use of force against the two women, the Supreme Court ruled that the instructions of the responsible officer did not constitute a breach of his official duties, as his directives regarding the use of force were formulated as a general order requiring that force be limited to the minimum necessary, while leaving responsibility for determining the measures required by the situation to the officers on the scene.
The judges considered that the officers had legal grounds to remove one of the two women from the recording room after she refused to leave, and the majority of the judges considered that the amount of force used by the officers was proportional to the extent of the two women’s resistance.
It is noteworthy that Finnish law obliges officers and police to rely first on the methods of advice, request and issuance of orders, while the use of force is considered a last resort and when absolutely necessary and in proportion to the nature of the mission.
The five-judge Supreme Court made its decision by a majority of four votes to one dissenting vote, as Judge Tuja Turpinen considered that the use of force, specifically to take photographs without a head covering, was not justified; Because the two women offered to move their head coverings back in a way that left the face and ears exposed, according to the Helsinki Times.
Judge Turpinen believes that the photographs in the manner proposed by the two women would have allowed their identities to be identified at later stages of the registration process.
For its part, the Council on American-Islamic Relations stated in its statement that “identity verifications can be easily conducted in ways that balance safety requirements and formal procedures without stripping individuals of their basic religious rights.”
He considered that "depriving Muslim women of their right to modesty - under the pretext of legal duty - establishes a dangerous precedent that threatens religious freedom throughout Europe."
This incident sparked widespread interaction on social media, and opinions were divided between those who support the rule of law and consider that anyone who wants to live in a country must abide by all its laws and regulations, while others see this as an attack on personal and religious freedoms.
