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RAIMO LAHTI
The programmes of the seminars were oriented towards traditional comparison
of legal cultures and solutions, i.e., our cooperation was directed to comparative
criminal law and criminal justice. A clear change in the orientation of Finnish¬
Hungarian cooperation took place from the 1990s. It had to do with the collapse of
the “Iron Curtain” in 1989 and the following political-economic changes in Europe
and globally as well as the emergence of legal development which has often been
described by the expression “Europeanization and internationalization of criminal
law”. In the 2000s the general themes of the seminars were fully in accordance
with the new priorities. The rapid development towards an international criminal
law and European criminal law since the 1990s compelled to reassess the role
of comparative criminal law and to pay attention to the intensified interaction
between regional and international (or global) legal regulations on one hand, and
the national legal orders, on the other.*
The total reform of Finnish criminal law was in fact implemented by partial
legislative packages in 1980—2003°. The penal thinking which was adopted in
this total reform (recodification) can be characterized by the demand for a more
rational criminal justice system: i.e., for an efficient, just and humane criminal
justice. The penal system must be both rational as to its goals (utility) and rational
as to its basic values (justice. humaneness). An important effect of the new
criminal and sanction policy can be seen in the reduced use of custodial sentences
in Finland. Since the mid-1970s, the relative number of offenders sentenced to
unconditional imprisonment was on the decrease until 1999: from 118 in 1976 to
65 in 1999 per 100 000 population and to the level of the other Nordic countries.
At the same time the development of registered criminality signed a similar trend
in all of Nordic countries, so that a dramatic cut in the prisoner rate in Finland
did not result in a proportionate increase in the incidence of crime compared with
other Nordic countries, where the prisoner rate stayed quite stable.’
* See Lahti, Homage to Imre A. Wiener, 22-24.
The revised Finnish Penal Code with the amendments up to 766/2015 is electronically
accessible as an unofficial translation into English from the website of the Ministry of
Justice: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/kaannokset/1889/en18890039_20150766.pdf.
° In more detail, see Raimo Lahti, Recodifying the Finnish Criminal Code of 1889: Towards
a More Efficient, Just and Humane Criminal Law, Israel Law Review 27 (1993), 100-117;
idem, Towards a Rational and Humane Criminal Policy — Trends in Scandinavian Penal
Thinking, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 1 (2000),
141-155. See also the article collections Raimo Lahti, Zur Kriminal- und Strafrechtspolitik
des 21. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2019; idem, Towards an Efficient, Just and Humane
Criminal Justice, Helsinki, Finnish Lawyers’ Association, 2021.
In more detail, see Patrik Tornudd, Fifteen Years of Decreasing Prisoner Rates in Finland,
Helsinki, National Research Institute of Legal Policy (NRILP), 1993; Tapio Lappi-Seppala,
Regulating the Prison Population, Helsinki, NRILP, 1998.
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