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Prosecutor drops ethnic agitation charges against former Left Alliance official

Tweets sent in 2016 had called for violent acts to be committed against 'fascists' and 'climate change deniers', among others.

Kuvakollaasi kolmesta tviitistä, tietokone taustalla.
Screenshots of some of the tweets sent in 2016 that led to police opening a preliminary investigation. Image: Laura Mainiemi / Yle, Kuvankäsittely: Joonas Haverinen / Yle
  • Yle News

A prosecutor has dropped charges of ethnic agitation against a former executive director of the Left Alliance party's Western Finland branch.

The party's former official, Misha Dellinger, was suspected of the charge because of tweets posted in 2016 to the micro-blogging website Twitter.

The tweets called for violent acts to be committed against 'fascists' and 'climate change deniers', among others.

Police in southwestern Finland launched a preliminary investigation into the case last year, and Dellinger denied he had sent the tweets during the course of the pre-trial probe.

However, Finland's Prosecutor General ruled that no crime was committed, as the groups of people described in the tweets — climate change deniers, fascists, Nazis — were not sufficiently fixed or well-defined to form a group of people as defined and protected by Finland's ethnic agitation legislation.