Finns Party MP’s assistant suggests armbands for immigrants

According to the Turun Sanomat, Finns Party MP James Hirvisaari, who was last year convicted and fined by Kouvola District Court for incitement to ethnic or racial hatred, is in trouble again.

This time the cause is his parliamentary assistant Helena Eronen, who suggested on her blog on the Uusi Suomi website that making it mandatory for immigrants to wear armbands would make policing significantly easier.

“If every foreigner was obliged to wear a mark on their sleeve stating their country of origin, then the police could see at a glance that ‘aha, there’s a muslim from Somalia’, or ‘aha, that’s a beggar from Romania’,” Eronen wrote. Muslims could be assigned a crescent mark, Eronen added, and Russian immigrants a hammer and sickle emblem. She also proposed identifying marks for Swedish Finns and homosexuals.

The blog post was added on Wednesday afternoon, but was removed later that evening.

Eronen is the second Finns Party parliamentary to cause controversy. Late last year Juho Eerola’s parliamentary assistant Ulla Pyysalo admitted applying for membership of a Finnish neo-Nazi party. According to a YLE report on February 23, Pyysalo was allowed to remain in her position because she couldn’t find any other job.

Helsinki Times, 12 April 2012