A woman has been remanded into custody on suspicion of helping a man fake his own death after his application for asylum was rejected.
The woman appeared at Espoo District court on Friday and was remanded into custody on suspicion of aggravated fraud and aggravated forgery.
According to information received by Yle, the woman is the asylum seeker’s daughter, who had received compensation for his death after taking Finland to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The 44-year-old man had arrived in Finland in 2015 and sought asylum but was rejected. He returned to Iraq in 2017 and shortly after his return it was reported in Finland that he had been murdered.
In 2019 Finland was ordered by the ECHR to pay 20,000 euros' compensation to the man’s daughter, as it ruled the authorities had violated the man’s right to life and put him at risk of torture.
The EHCR particularly reprimanded Finland for failing to perform a proper evaluation of possible future threats to the man’s life.
International law and human rights professor Martin Scheinin told Yle that Finland can seek to have the ECHR judgement overturned if the man's murder is proven to have been staged.
