Christian politician urges UK gov’t to lift ban on entering country for quoting the Bible

Finnish lawmaker and former Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen is pressing the U.K. government to lift a travel ban keeping her from entering the U.K. after her conviction for expressing Christian beliefs about marriage and sexual ethics.

Räsänen was invited to speak at the "Faith in the Public Square" conference at Stormont, Northern Ireland's Assembly building, an event associated with the Bangor Worldwide Missionary Convention.

The U.K. canceled her Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA), in July, having first approved it the month before, according to ADF International, which is supporting her case.

The cancellation came after Finland’s Supreme Court convicted Räsänen of “hate speech” in March over a 2004 church booklet she wrote about marriage and sexuality.

Räsänen, who sits in the Finnish Parliament's "Friends of the United Kingdom" group and has served as an MP for 31 years, was reportedly forced to address the conference remotely on Wednesday and Friday. She and the group had urged Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to intervene before Friday.

Members of Northern Ireland's Legislative Assembly had separately called for Räsänen to be barred from speaking at Stormont even before her ETA was canceled, according to the Christian Institute.

Räsänen called the U.K.’s action shocking, saying it had barred a democratically elected politician from an allied European state. She said she had been convicted of “hate speech” in Finland for peacefully expressing her Christian views, calling it “an egregious case of state censorship.”

Räsänen said she believed the U.K. denied her travel authorization because her case is pending before the European Court of Human Rights, calling it punishment for exercising her human rights. She urged Mahmood to reverse the decision.

Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola, who published the booklet with Räsänen and was convicted alongside her, faces the same entry ban after the U.K. also turned down his ETA in June.

Räsänen went on to apply for a full visa and personally wrote to Mahmood, but doesn't expect a reply before the conference.

Räsänen, Pohjola and the Luther Foundation Finland, all convicted in March, have taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights. ADF International is handling their appeal.

Kristen Waggoner, CEO of ADF International, urged Mahmood to intervene, arguing that Britain should not uphold another country's "heavy-handed censorship."

ADF International lawyer Lorcán Price said Räsänen’s entry ban stems from her peacefully expressing her Christian beliefs. He said Britain has spent the past year barring conservative figures and politicians, and now includes a Finnish lawmaker and a bishop, part of what he called a crackdown on Christians, some of whom he said have also faced criminal charges for silently praying and preaching their faith in public.

Price said Mahmood should act immediately to let his client attend the Northern Ireland event in person, warning that continued silence would signal the government has “a deep-seated antipathy to free speech.”

Pohjola called it “an Orwellian reality” that he was kept out of Britain. He said it was extremely alarming for a member of the clergy to face criminal punishment in one country and a travel ban in another over a religious pamphlet, adding that it showed how far civilization had strayed from its Christian roots and from respecting free speech and religious freedom.

Pohjola said he hopes that the European court upholds the right to free speech, adding that peacefully expressing traditional Christian views on marriage and sexuality “is not a crime.”

Räsänen, a doctor and grandmother of 12, spent nearly seven years under prosecution over a 2019 tweet, a live radio debate and the church booklet, with Pohjola and the Luther Foundation Finland named alongside her in the booklet case. Prosecutors in 2021 accused her of “agitation against a minority group,” a charge filed under a criminal code section labeled “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Two lower courts unanimously cleared her on every charge in 2022 and 2023, but prosecutors took the tweet and the booklet back to the Supreme Court. Judges heard the case in October 2025 and, in March, split 3-2 to keep her cleared over the Bible-verse tweet while convicting her, Pohjola and the Luther Foundation Finland over the booklet. The radio-debate charge went unappealed, leaving that acquittal in place.

Judges convicted her under a law passed years after the booklet came out, despite acknowledging it “did not contain incitement to violence or comparable threat-like fomenting of hatred.” Each defendant was fined several thousand euros, and the court ordered the disputed passages destroyed.

Before the March conviction, the U.S. State Department said, “In a democracy, no one should face trial for peacefully sharing their beliefs,” and called the case against Räsänen baseless. After the verdict, the U.S. Embassy in Finland said punishing nonviolent religious expression as a crime “sets a troubling precedent for religious freedom and freedom of expression.”

Räsänen testified before Congress on Feb. 4, highlighting how European censorship laws could affect free speech in the U.S.

U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers separately said, "Päivi was prosecuted for quoting the Bible. A downstream effect of countries criminalizing speech is that systems designed to flag and filter 'criminals' trigger ripple effects."