This paper analyzes accuracy in authentic telephone-interpreting data in which the migrant and the interpreter communicate in French as a lingua franca, namely a language that is not their first language. The data consists of an interview conducted by a law-enforcement officer in Finland. The analysis is based on the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language theorized within systemic-functional grammar. The analysis shows that the particularities of both telephone-mediated interpreting and lingua-franca interpreting engender significant communication problems. As a result, accuracy is not achieved, and the interpreter has to use strategies that are questionable in terms of the codes of conduct of community and legal interpreters. The interpreter is an active agent in the co-construction, maintenance, and erasure of indexical meanings such as speaker identities. In addition, due to linguistic and contextual constraints, the interpreter takes a prominent role as a coordinator of turns. The paper suggests that interpreters’ deontological codes are based on monolithic language ideologies and unrealistic expectations that should be reconsidered to correspond to the specific features of lingua franca and telephone interpreting.

In Finland, forensic age assessment is strictly regulated by legislation. According to the Aliens Act (301/2004) and the amendment of the Act (549/2010), the police authorities, the frontier guard authorities, and the immigration authorities have the right to refer asylum seekers to the University of Helsinki, Department of Forensic Medicine, for age assessment. These assessments are especially performed to solve if the person is of major age, the cutoff being 18 completed years. The forensic age assessment is largely based on dental development, since the special permit of the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) to the Department of Forensic Medicine of the University of Helsinki, allowing the use of ionizing radiation for non-medical purposes, includes dental and hand X-rays. Forensic age assessment is always performed by two forensic odontologists. In 2015, the total number of forensic age assessment examinations was 149, and the countries of origin of the asylum seekers were most commonly Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. The current legislation on forensic age assessment has been well received and approved. Radiological and other examinations can be performed in different parts of Finland, but the forensic odontologist at the University of Helsinki is always involved in the process and ensures joint quality standards for the forensic age assessment.

The system of governance of the national reception system in Finland can be described as a centralised state–led system with a top-down decision-making, where the municipalities and civil society are key partners in implementation processes, but they can only indirectly influence the governance of the reception system. Reception and integration are formally two different areas of practice, with the state as responsible for reception measures and the municipalities responsible for integration measures. The centralisation of the system has involved the strengthening of the role of the Finnish Immigration Service. The administrative reforms involve a long history of centralisation and Europeanisation of the administration, which predates the so-called migration crisis of 2015. A convergence of the functioning, accessibility and quality of reception services is an aim of the centralised national system. Yet, the system also involves structural conflicts of interest between local and national perspectives, which are strengthened by the legal and administrative division of reception and integration into two different areas of practice.

The rise of neonationalist politics and racist activism has characterised many European countries in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing public focus on gendered and sexualised intimacies. These two tendencies have increasingly intertwined and sexual violence has become a site for struggles over feminist and (anti)racist politics. The article examines what I call the ‘crisis’ of white hegemony arising in the aftermath of the arrival of a large number of refugees in 2015-2016 and the different strategies that women’s and feminist activism has developed. Within white nationalism, there is an upsurge of ‘white border guard femininities’: white women who mobilise on social media and in far-right groups. Simultaneously, antiracist feminist activism has strengthened. It seeks to confront racist discourses of foreign perpetrators and to redirect the discussion by addressing structural aspects of racial and gendered hierarchies and voicing experiences of harassment that are bypassed in the public discussions.

This report addresses the politicization of common European policy for refugee relocation, with particular focus on the question of responsibility for the so-called “refugee crisis”. As Finland faced the tenfold increase in the annual number of asylum seekers in 2015, public debate on the topic was rapidly electrified. The media attention culminated in September, when Finland decided as the only member state to abstain from voting on the issue of relocation. The decision was widely considered to be imposed on the Finnish government by the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist Finns party, whose path to the coalition government was paved with the party’s highly mediatized anti-immigration political rhetoric during the past decade. This report defines politicization as a practice of competitive claims-making in in the public sphere. Politicization is analyzed within two distinct corpora: a mainstream news corpus of 127 articles in Finland’s largest daily newspaper, and a parliamentary debates corpus consisting of 26 addresses by Finnish MPs to the floor during 10 plenary sessions. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we conclude that while both arenas exerted strong influence on public opinion and heavily politicized the issue of refugee relocation, there are important differences in how the question of responsibility was framed within the two contexts. The articles published during the first episode of contention (March – November 2015) focus on the strife between Visegrád countries and other member states. The articles underline EU’s shortcomings in mediating the conflicted interests among member states, presenting Finland’s decision to abstain as tacit support to the bloc opposing common relocation mechanisms, and decrying the ensuing impact to Finland’s previously conciliatory reputation within the EU. On the other hand, the parliamentary debates taking place in the turn of the year are largely dominated by Finns party MPs. The debates emphasize Finland’s sovereign responsibility to prevent crime and protect the autochthonous population’s welfare from irregular migration, often framed in terms of “illegal refugees.” While refugees plight is repeatedly presented as the responsibility of the sending countries, the MPs commonly assert that the EU is responsible for letting in “the wave of refugees”.