A City of Helsinki deputy councilor has come under fire after he publicly stated in a Facebook post that African men who come to Finland as refugees should not be allowed to have more than three children, and should be sterilized instead.
According to Olli Sademies, 67, the problem with African immigrants is that they have too many children. So forced sterilization is the way to tackle it, he suggested.
"Migrants put to the test our social security," Sademies wrote. "Africa's social security is based on a large number of children, which enables some children to live longer and take care of their parents."
In order "to avoid total collapse" of a similar system in Finland, African refugees should be restricted, Sademies said. "Three children maximum. It would require the forced sterilization of African men, which will effectively discourage them from trundling into our country," he wrapped up.
The Finns Party that Sademies is a member of has rushed to distance itself from the controversial statement.
Party Secretary Riikka Sjunga-Poutsalo said on Twitter that Sademies’s comments are only his own views, not those of the party.
Seppo Kanerva, who leads the group of Finns Party councilors on the Helsinki council, slammed Sademies' remarks.
"What he’s written is completely mad," Kanerva told Yle’s Swedish language news service, according to Yle in English. "It’s fascism. Hitler thought in the same way. I don’t understand why he wrote that."
The politician told Helsingin Sanomat daily he stands behind his words.
"This is a way to tackle the problem, and I wait for better suggestions. Tell us what would be better!" he told the HS.
In 2012, a Finns Party parliamentary assistant Helena Eronen raised eyebrows when she suggested on her blog on the Uusi Suomi website to make it compulsory for immigrants to wear armbands.
"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, as cited by the Helsinki Times.
Earlier this month, over 300,000 people signed an online petition calling for the Sun to sack columnist Katie Hopkins, who described African migrants as “cockroaches.” The article, published just five days after 400 people died when a migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea last month, provoked public outrage.
“NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad,” she wrote. “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984,’ but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.”
The UN’s human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, commented that UK tabloids like the Murdoch-owned Sun that published Hopkins' comments, bring back the dark days of the Nazi media.
“The Nazi media described people their masters wanted to eliminate as rats and cockroaches,” the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in April.