The report is based on an analysis of the decision related to the residence permit application of approximately 500 parents of Finnish children born abroad. Almost a third of the applications were rejected.
Finland’s public broadcasting company wrote that the decisions seem to place less emphasis on the interests of the child than on previous violations of entry rules, a perceived threat to public safety, or criminal suspicions. The foreign-born parent of a Finnish child can be removed from the country if, for example, he has given misleading information about his identity or arrived in the country without proper travel documents.
According to the MOT, many decisions were justified on similar grounds. Migri has repeatedly claimed that the removal of one parent would not exceptionally threaten the child’s interests, that parenting is possible through video calls, and that a few-year-old child would not miss the other parent.
“We have to be convinced that here in Finland there is at least one person who can take care of the child. In today’s world, you can communicate a lot electronically,” he said Olli KoskipirttiMigr’s unit manager.
“If we’re dealing with a very young child, say a two-year-old, they can adapt to a situation where the other parent may not be there.”
Sanna ValtonenThe chairman of the Support for Asylum Seekers (Tutu), reminded MOT that Finland’s immigration system is built to control immigration, a legacy that has led to years of “ethos of restriction”.
He also noticed a contradiction in Migri’s logic: “If you talk about deporting the child and the parents, you say that it is in the child’s best interest to be with his parents, but if you talk about deporting the parent, they say that the child’s best interest does not explicitly require that he be with the other parent.”
Migri does not place sufficient emphasis on children’s rights Urpo Kangasemeritus professor of civil law at the University of Helsinki and Tuomas Ojanenprofessor of constitutional law at the University of Helsinki.
Fabric on Monday told According to YLE, the concept of “exceptional threat to the child’s welfare” is not rooted in the law.
“When expressed this way, the position is clearly against the law and international agreements,” he emphasized. “It is quite cruel to stipulate that a child only needs one parent by his side if he has two legal parents.”
Arguments that parenting could be handled remotely and that a small child adapts to life without another parent are also questionable, according to Ojanen. According to him, it is wrong to primarily investigate whether the child’s interests would be threatened without one of the parents, because in principle the child’s right to both parents can be limited only when the child would have a better life without the other parent. about parents.
“They’ve got apples and oranges mixed up,” he said.
“You can only imagine the kind of riots that would arise in Finland if the authorities decided that the realization of a child’s best interests does not require the presence of both parents, and especially small children adapt to life without one parent.”
In Ojanen’s opinion, such decisions seem problematic in many respects in light of international agreements protecting children’s rights. Formal decisions seem to prioritize immigration control at the expense of children’s rights, creating inequality between children of international and foreign couples.
In one case investigated by the MOT, Migri described a foreign-born man who has joint custody of a Finnish child as a “formal guardian” who does not practice “real family life” with his child because the child lives permanently with his ex. -wife, “true guardian”.
Kangas emphasized that the expressions “official guardian” and “actual guardian” have no basis in the law on child custody and visitation rights, because the law simply refers to “guardians”. The expression “real family life”, on the other hand, contradicts the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights protecting family life.
“They are expressions that reflect the personal attitudes of the author of the justification, which reveal the author’s values,” he opined.
Migri, he added, appears to be inventing criteria and twisting the wording of laws in ways that bolster its decisions to deny residence permits.
Migrin Koskipirtti told MOT that the service plans to soften its approach in the future and adopt a more “customer-friendly” approach. “We have considered how much license applicants can be punished for past reprehensible behavior. If family life is real and genuine, we want to emphasize it more.”
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
Source: The Nordic Page