US embassy cable - 05HELSINKI589

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 HELSINKI 000589 
 
SIPDIS 
 
PLEASE PASS TO EUR/NB AND G/TIP 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PHUM, SMIG, SOCI, FI, Trafficking-In-Persons 
SUBJECT: FINLAND: EMBASSY PARTICIPATES IN ORTHODOX CHURCH 
SEMINAR ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING 
 
 
1.  (U)  Poloff David Schlaefer spoke at a conference on 
trafficking-in-persons organized by the Finnish Orthodox 
Church on April 11 in Joensuu, Finland.  The Finnish Orthodox 
Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church are both recognized as 
official state churches by the GoF.  Although only around 2% 
of Finns are practicing Orthodox (approximately 60,000-70,000 
people), the Church maintains an influential role in Finnish 
politics and society and has actually seen modest growth in 
recent years, whereas the dominant Lutheran Church (over 80% 
of Finns are Lutheran) has experienced a decline during the 
same period.  The Joensuu seminar was held at the Finnish 
Orthodox Seminary in Northern Karelia near the Russian 
border, an area with a large Orthodox population.  Increased 
attention to trafficking-in-persons in the Nordic-Baltic 
region prompted the Church to organize the seminar to explore 
the Church's role and responsibilities as the EU expands and 
issues such as trafficking, refugees, migratory pressures, 
etc., become more severe. 
 
 
Emphasis on the Victim 
---------------------- 
 
2.  (U)  Poloff spoke to the group of about 40 clergy, 
activists, and seminary students about the importance of 
crafting an approach to trafficking in persons that focuses 
victim assistance and victim's rights.  Poloff emphasized 
that internationally accepted definitions of trafficking 
recognized that coercion could occur at any point of the 
process;  even if a woman entered a country willingly to work 
as a prostitute, if an element of coercion was later employed 
by her handlers to exploit her for commercial gain and secure 
her continued acquiescence, then a trafficking dynamic 
existed.  The fact that Finland's new National Action Plan 
recognized this and promoted a victim-centered approach to 
the issue was a significant step forward for Finland.  Poloff 
told the group that governments alone would never be able to 
stop human trafficking, and provided examples of  state-NGO 
partnerships that had made effective use of complementary 
strengths and resources to combat TIP.  Poloff suggested that 
it was in the area of victim assistance that institutions 
like the Orthodox Church could play an important role in the 
Nordic-Baltic region in fighting trafficking. 
 
3.  (U)  Finland's Speaker of Parliament, Paavo Lipponen, 
also addressed the conference and led a discussion about 
trafficking in Finland and the broader Nordic-Baltic region. 
Lipponen told the participants that the United States had 
been right in the past when criticizing Finland's approach to 
trafficking through its annual TIP report.  He said that 
Finns had not believed that trafficking was an issue in their 
country since there are no "sex districts" as are found in 
some other countries and the phenomenon was invisible to the 
general public.  However, he said that Finland now recognized 
that a problem existed and would continue to exist since 
"Finland's neighborhood" was not going to change and 
countries like Russia would continue to provide opportunities 
for traffickers to exploit poor women.  Lipponen praised 
Finland's interagency TIP working group, and said that 
implementation of the country's new National Action Plan 
should be given the highest priority.  He also said that the 
GoF and institutions like the Church needed to address the 
phenomenon of Finns going abroad to engage in "sex tourism," 
a practice that aided traffickers and hurt the women involved. 
 
Conclusions 
----------- 
4.  (U)  The general discussion that followed the 
presentations suggested that the Orthodox Church, perhaps in 
partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, should 
develop an action plan at the regional level to assist 
governments and non-governmental organizations in combating 
trafficking.  Swedish Bishop Ragnar Svensrud said that the 
Orthodox Church's conservative positions on issues such as 
immigration and migration should not stand in the way of 
recognizing that the "free movement of goods and people" 
would have an ever greater affect on Europe, and that the 
Church had an inherent moral responsibility to assist the 
most vulnerable in society, including trafficking victims. 
There was also an extended discussion of the Church's role 
(if any) in countering a secular permissiveness that 
contributed to Finnish (and other) European men believing 
that there was nothing morally wrong in frequenting brothels 
in "Thailand or Amsterdam or Estonia," despite the fact that 
the women they visited, whether trafficked or not, were still 
victims of an exploitation that would scar most of them 
mentally and physically for life.  The difficulty of 
addressing moral issues in general in a postmodern secular 
Europe was cited as a challenge for the Church in grappling 
with issues like trafficking. 
MACK