Quite a while ago I wrote a blog post about one of the biggest flaws in the Finnish judiciary system.
You see, unlike for example in the United States, in Finland the winning party in a lawsuit gets automatically his legal fees paid by the losing party, no questions asked.
On paper this makes sense: If you are innocent, you must not be punished in any way, shape or form, and losing money to pay for attorney fees would be such an unjust form of indirect punishment. Thus, the legal system has been built onto the foundation that the losing party pays for the legal fees of the winning party, period. If you are guilty, your victim must not suffer any monetary losses because of the lawsuit. If you are not guilty, then you must not suffer any monetary losses, because you did nothing wrong.
On paper, and at first glance, that makes a lot of sense and seems very unjustified.
The problem? It actually gives the lawyers of the winning party pretty much free range to punish the losing party however much they want, completely regardless of the severity of the transgression.
No better example of this than a case of copyright infringement a while ago, where a Finnish man was tried for distributing copyrighted music online. He was found guilty and sentenced to a 100€ fine.
That's it. 100 euros. The judge deemed the crime to be so insignificant that the fine was essentially pocket money.
The problem? By losing now he had to pay the legal fees of the prosecuting entities (some music company representatives). How much were these "legal fees" that he had to pay?
33000€.
That's right. Because of a "crime" worthy of a 100€ fine, which on its own would have been extremely moderate and would not have hurt him financially at all, he ended up having to pay 33100€, which is staggering. It's the yearly salary of a relatively well-paying job, and for almost any average citizen means financial ruin for a long time.
And the thing is: That 33000€ was completely decided by the lawyers, not by the court of law. Based on their word alone. It was essentially bypassing any judiciary system, any laws. They just decided it was that amount, and that's it: The guy had to pay it, because of the Finnish judiciary system.
Needless to say, the effective punishment was not only grossly disproportional to the severity of the crime, but moreover its quantity was not determined by a court of law but some private lawyers. Which is completely preposterous.
And there is no law against this. Nothing. This has been going on for decades and decades, and lawmakers don't even want to change it. To my knowledge it has never even been under discussion in parliament.
Of course this is not, by far, the only failure of the Finnish judiciary system. The Finnish reporter Hannu Karpo produced a regular TV show for 27 years exposing such flaws in the judiciary system, as well as cases of corruption in said judiciary system, governmental agencies and law enforcement. Over those years there were literally hundreds of examples.
One running theme with most of these examples, something that many Finns have noticed and know, is that for some reason the Finnish judiciary system and law enforcement really favors big powerful megacorporations and other entities (such as banks) over individual people. For example, in Finland it's essentially impossible for an individual citizen to sue a bank (especially a big one). Not only does law enforcement and governmental agencies put enormous amounts of red tape in the way of such a lawsuit, but moreover almost no Finnish lawyer will be willing to take such a case (Karpo's show had several examples of this, some of the particularly egregious, for example one where a bank had pretty much in essence stolen a client's property completely bypassing and breaking the law, and everybody in law enforcement and government refused to cooperate and all lawyers refused to take the case. There was nothing that the man could do about it because essentially the entire government and all lawyers abandoned him because they didn't want to go against a big bank.)
One more minor thing that I remember was a political commentator writing a piece about something that the prosecutor of the Finnish judiciary system often tends to do.
You see, quite often when the government's prosecutor wants to prosecute a citizen of some crime (such as "hate speech"), a document will be sent to the accused informing him of this, and for him to sign.
However, this document is not just a piece of paper that says "you have been accused of this crime and you will be investigated and possibly prosecuted for it. Sign it to acknowledge that you have received it."
Instead, it says, paraphrasing: "You have been accused of this crime and are under investigation. Sign this paper to plead guilty of the crime and thus bypass the court trial and go directly to sentencing."
The thing is that said document is worded in a very unclear manner, using obscure legal jargon (this political commentator quoted the document to show how confusing and misleading it was.) Many people who don't read the document carefully and/or understand exactly what it says, very easily end up signing it and inadvertently agreeing to something they didn't intend, ie. pleading guilty and completely bypassing the possibility of defending themselves, going directly to sentencing.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of innocent people have been convicted in this manner, or given much harsher sentences than they actually deserved, just because they were misled into signing an agreement they didn't fully understand.
(Yes, there might be means to contest such agreements afterwards. Well, good luck with that. You'll be facing a system that's essentially against you, and you will be risking having to pay the government's legal fees if you lose. Most people are not eager to go through that process and just accept their fate. They prefer paying eg. a 1000€ fine now than risk 10k for their own lawyer costs, 50k for the government's legal fees, possibly a much higher fine, and possibly even a jail sentence. The prosecution will always go the whole nine yards if the citizen wants to go to court rather than accept the plea offer.)
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