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Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary, the Embassy of Finland
First of all, let me thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about the
experiences from Finland. And also to thank you for the excellent cooperation the
Embassy of Finland has had with the KPI. As you mentioned kindly, the beginning of
this week, we hosted together also with other partners like Union Women and the
European Union the big seminar on Women’s Participation in Politics that I think was
a wonderful joint effort and wonderful joint success and I hope we will continue on
this cooperation.
I would like to mainly focus on two issues from Finnish society, namely Gender
Equality, especially from the political side, and Education. But, before going there,
I would like to say a few words more generally about the institutions and laws and
so forth. And in my remarks, I will have a timeline of approximately 100 years. This
might sound very long or very short, but I think it was exactly the right one because
Finland gained its independence in 1917, so 101 years ago. So, a lot of things, of
course, started from that point. But actually the roots of many issues that I’m
discussing go also beyond earlier days of this as well. But, I think that we have to
look into that kind of time perspective when talking about the Finnish society today.
Perhaps, to start with today where Finland is today, I’m extremely glad that
Finland has enjoyed the very high sort of the position in the international comparisons.
For instance, when it comes to the level of development, sustainable development,
prosperity, environmental protection, competitiveness, lack of corruption, innovation
technology, technological development and so forth. Every time we stop and think, ok,
why is it so… I think that those two issues, education and gender equality they
come up sort of as major building blocks. But before going there, I just wanted to
say about the general, sort of framework in the society if we want to have a truly
democratic, truly inclusive, and truly equal society for all. I do think that we need
strong independent institutions, of course, and there, Finland made… this is a little bit
before when we became independent in 1906. We had major shifting in our political
system. We have been quite traditional sort of with four chambers, very unequal
system actually. And in overnight it changed to the most modern system with one
chamber parliament with all men and all women gaining the right to vote and the
right to stand for elections. So, we made like a major leap from one political system
to the other. So, that was sort of the beginning of our current system. Actually, what
my people might find often a little bit surprising is that Finland doesn’t have
constitutional court. We have a Constitutional Committee in the parliament. So, we
want to make sure that before the laws are adopted that their constitutionality is
checked. So, we have the parliament. In parliament we have the Constitutional
Committee that every law that there are elements of constitutional issues or any risk
with being not confirmed between the constitution. It goes to the Constitutional ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ
Committee which then hears experts. And I must say that it’s very often that issues
