Poliittinen pakolainen: Oikeushistoriallinen tutkielma pakolaisuuden oikeudellistumisesta Suomessa

The thesis examines the controversy surrounding the preparation and enactment of Finland's first Aliens Act, which entered into force in 1984, on the nature of asylum decision-making as a political and a judicial exercise of power. As a result of the political struggle, refugeedom was not judicialised, but asylum decisions remained subject to political expediency until 1999. By analysing legal immutability, the thesis aims to diversify the debate on judicialisation and broaden the perspectives of examining the scope of administrative legal protection. At the same time, the thesis discusses the impact of the Cold War on Finnish legal culture.

The extensive body of parliamentary, legislative and other archival documents is interpreted mainly in the context of the findings of historical and legal research and the memoirs of contemporaries. The thesis sheds light on the reasons, interests and values that influenced the perceptions of the separation of law and politics underlying the administrative redress of refugees. The contextual analysis also explores the factors that triggered the changes in these perceptions and led to calls for the judicialisation of refugeedom.

Since the early days of independence, internal security, which had been justified by the judicial freedom to exercise power over refugees, gave way to external security after the Second World War. Tied to the Soviet sphere of influence, Finland balanced between Western human rights principles, framed as universals, and relations with the East. The thesis identifies five complementary phenomena behind the demands for the judicialisation of refugeedom that culminated in the Aliens Act project: Western speculations about Finland's independence, the emergence of legal protection as a social issue as a result of the neo-leftist movement criticising the power of control, the sensitisation of jurisprudence to issues related to the use of power in particular, demands for a new foreign policy, and the criticism of President Urho Kekkonen and his foreign policy by the anti-communist right.

The thesis finds that foreign and security policy factors were the main factors behind the non-judicialisation of refugeedom. By revising earlier interpretations, the thesis argues that the Soviet Union had at least an indirect influence on Finnish legal culture. It was only the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that created the political-structural conditions in Finland for treating refugeedom as a judicial rather than a political issue. What is presented in the thesis gives reason to reflect on the breakthrough of fundamental and human rights in Finnish legal culture as a more complex process than a development called new constitutionalisation or Europeanisation.