The Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen, who on 26 March this year was convicted by Finland’s Supreme Court for having written in 2004 that homosexuality is a psychosexual developmental disorder, has now been denied entry to the United Kingdom.

Räsänen herself disclosed this to media outlets including Ilta-Sanomat and the Daily Signal.

The list of conservative figures in the West who have been denied the electronic travel authorisation (ETA) required to enter the island nation has grown rather long, and it has now happened to the 66-year-old mother, grandmother, physician and long-serving member of the Finnish Parliament (Eduskunta), who has also served as Minister of the Interior and leader of the Christian Democrats.

The decision by the British authorities has forced Räsänen to change her travel plans, Helsinki Times reports.

The Christian Democrat MP said she had planned to return from the United States to Finland via Heathrow Airport. She explained that her ETA application had initially been approved automatically, before the British authorities revoked the authorisation a few days before departure, forcing her to book an alternative route home.

No reason was given for the refusal, but it is undoubtedly due to the Finnish Supreme Court judgment, which found her guilty of ethnic agitation on the basis of what she had written in a 2004 pamphlet about the traditional Christian view of homosexuality. The pamphlet had been distributed in a church context and was later published on the internet. The Court fined the 66-year-old and ordered her to censor the parts of the pamphlet it had criminalised.

Unable to clarify the matter before the weekend, Räsänen consulted a British lawyer about travelling via Heathrow without an ETA. She said she was advised against doing so because of the possibility of immigration checks during transit. She subsequently purchased a ticket via another route and returned to Finland on Saturday.

“This came as a real shock to me,” she told Ilta-Sanomat. “It never occurred to me that the judgment would have such consequences.”

The United Kingdom introduced the ETA system for travellers from many visa-exempt countries. Under the government’s rules, authorisation must be refused if an applicant has committed criminal offences that have caused serious harm.

Räsänen’s husband, who had also applied for an ETA, was not refused.

The long-running legal proceedings against her were triggered after she criticised the Finnish Church in 2019 for supporting Pride in a social media post in which she quoted the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where homosexual practice is regarded as a sin.

Räsänen was initially acquitted by two courts, but Finland’s Prosecutor General appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which convicted her by a vote of three to two. The judgment made clear that it was not the biblical quotation for which she was ultimately convicted, but the clinical characterisation of homosexuality.