Finland
Legal situation, institutional practice and public debate
The legislation and administrative practice for DNA testing for family reunification of asylum seekers and refugees has been deployed in Finland since 2000. Finland was the first country in Europe to officially establish such a testing procedure. According to Finnish immigration law, a person with refugee status or a residence permit has a right to have his or her family reunited. A refugee is allowed to take a DNA test to prove biological family ties if there is no documentation of identity or kinship ties, or if the documents provided are not considered sufficient by the immigration authorities and the interviews with family members do not provide certainty of a biological kinship. The testing requires an informed consent of the tested; however, refusing the test leads the denial of family reunification by the authorities. The testing procedure is administered by the Directorate of Immigration as part of the family reunification procedure, and the actual DNA analyses are carried out by affiliated laboratories at university hospitals or the National Public Health Institute. The use of the DNA data obtained from the tests is restricted to family reunification purposes only.
The application of DNA testing in the management of refugees and asylum seekers did not result from a new immigration policy in Finland, but was conceived as a solution to a rather specific problem. In the early and mid 1990s, about 3000 people escaping a violent civil war in Somalia arrived in Finland and received residence permits. This was a large number of refugees in the Finnish context, and many of them were children without their own parents, i.e. ”unaccompanied minors” as the immigration authorities called them. In the late 1990s family reunification of the Somali refugees, especially with the mentioned group of children, became an issue. The Directorate of Immigration found the situation problematic, and it also wanted a tighter policy for family reunification. One solution to the refugee management problem was the introduction of DNA testing. A pilot project with 300 volunteers who had received negative responses to their family reunification applications was launched in the late 1990s. As a result of the project, the test proved the existence of biological kinship for the majority of the applicants, and the Directorate of Immigration had to change its previous decisions. The testing procedure was made official and embedded in immigration laws in 2000, and it has since been a standard procedure in the Finnish immigration administration. The actual family reunifications are decided case by case by the immigration officers, and the DNA tests are only seen to provide support for this decision-making. The testing is performed only on children under eighteen and to verify the relationship of the child to his or her mother. In addition, the immigration authorities follow the guideline in their decisions that a purely biological relationship is not sufficient for a positive decision on resident permit without the background of a permanent family life. Thus, a positive result in a DNA test does not automatically guarantee a family reunification in Finland; however, this policy allows a foster child, for example, to be granted a residence permit on the basis of family ties if identifiable as an integral member of the family.
The deployment of genomic analysis as a means to verify kinship relations in family reunification processes is considered a routine procedure of immigration management, but it is seen as a solution to a specific problem rather than a generalised practice. This reflects two characteristics of the Finnish immigration situation. First, the numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers in Finland are rather small compared to other Nordic and European countries. Second, Finnish immigration policy has been characterised by a kind of a compromise between two demands: on the one hand, it meets the obligations of international refugee and human rights agreements, but on the other hand, it remains rather restrictive. For this reason, the transparency of regulations and procedures is accompanied by a strong policing emphasis in Finnish immigration policy.
Some Finnish anthropologists have criticised the DNA testing procedure for restricting family and kinship to biological ties, and representatives of the Somali community and human rights activists have pointed out that the process of blood sample taking and analysis delays family reunification. However, these opinions have not acquired much force in the public discussion, and thus the use of DNA tests in immigration management is not debated at all in Finland. During the past year, public and political debate on immigration policy has become heated in Finland, and populist right-wing demands for a tightening of policy towards asylum seekers have grown stronger; however, the practice of family reunification via DNA tests has hardly been questioned or disputed. Most likely, the testing is seen as a merely technical and administrative procedure, one of the routines used by the immigration authorities.
