Jaana Kavonius

Jaana Kavonius (born September 10, 1966) is a Finnish lawyer and due process activist. On October 31, 2021, she started a hunger strike for freedom of speech. On November 6, she attended a freedom of speech seminar in Oodi, the central library of Helsinki, and fainted at the end of the event. In a news story reporting about this fainting, the mainstream tabloid Iltalehti had censored (blurred) her name in the picture of the banner which had been fastened in the camping car she lived in during the strike. Iltalehti cited "protecting her privacy" as the reason not to publish her name, though that obviously was not the real reason as in reality she had wanted publicity and her name to be published. Iltalehti did not report on the reason of the hunger strike either, but did report that she will stop the hunger strike. Jaana's name was not mentioned anywhere in the article, she was just referred as "the woman", while the person who gave her first aid, Päivi Räsänen (member of parliament from the Christian Democrat party; also a physician) was mentioned by name.

During the seminar, she tried to get the attention of another attendee (and a speaker), Sebastian Tynkkynen, the third vice chairman of the Finns Party, who livestreamed the event on YouTube. At the start of the first pause Sebastian asked his viewers if he should leave the stream on, and at that time some viewers of the livestream also asked Sebastian to interview Jaana. The sound of the livestream was muted for a short period of time, and Sebastian fled Jaana and turned the sound back on when he had walked far away from the original room. Right before fainting, Jaana had tried again to get Sebastian's attention after a photograph of the event's key figures (one of which was Sebastian) had been taken. This time, Sebastian stopped his stream for a second or two, after which he ignored her again and left the scene.

On March 19, 2023 Jaana and her assistant Sanna did a livestream on Instagram where they told that Jaana is close to dying due to her heart problems, and corrupt Finnish officials still force her to write responses to criminal interrogations (despite Jaana has not committed any crimes). Jaana has medical records to support her lawful requirement to extra time to reply, but Finnish officials do not care. In the video, Jaana compares herself to Alexey Navalny - they have the same number of human rights in their home countries. This video was uploaded also to Odysee by Injektiopiikki.

Jaana's main focus has been to reveal the corruption of the Finnish police and justice systems. According to Jaana, the leaders of Finnish police departments are mostly corrupt while the police officers that one sees on the streets are mostly honest.

Media censorship

Given that Jaana's name was not mentioned by Iltalehti in the article that reported about her fainting and hunger strike despite Jaana wanting her name to be published, it seems apparent that someone with the ability to control Finnish media has banned all media outlets from mentioning Jaana's name. On April 11, 2023, which was the first working day after the required statements of support had been collected, news items appeared in the Finnish mainstream media that the Truth Party would be entered in the party register. However, Iltalehti and Yle did not mention the chairwoman's name in their news items, nor was it visible in on the websites of Uutissuomalainen, Iisalmen Sanomat and Karjalainen, at least not without paying and logging in.

In this article by Ilta-Sanomat, Jaana's name is mentioned, the purpose of which may be to make the ban less obvious. That might have been the only article freely available online anywhere in Finnish mainstream media where her name was mentioned before the political party that she founded was registered. At least searching her name in quotes using Google from the websites of Yle, Helsingin Sanomat, Iltalehti, and Aamulehti yielded no results on April 11, 2023, and on Ilta-Sanomat's website, the only article found was the one just mentioned.

Political party

Jaana is the leader of the registered association Totuuspuolue ("Truth Party"), which became a political party on April 26, 2023.

Registering the party

The Truth Party started collecting statements of support on April 13, 2022 and needed 5000 of them within a year to officially become a political party. Jaana has also been trying to become Finland's next president. The required limit of 5000 statements of support was reached on April 8, 2023 which meant that the association would be registered as an official political party.

On April 12, 2023, the deadline day for collecting the statements of support, Jaana, her assistant Sanna and two other people did a livestream on Instagram where they left for review the twenty statements of support on paper that the party had collected. This was not technically even necessary as there were enough electronic statements of support already, but they did that anyway to honour the people who had signed a statement of support on paper. In that video, the team had to visit three places in total. First, they were at the Ministry of Justice, but there was no one there to receive the papers. The janitor sent the team to the Registry of the Ministry of Justice at the same address where the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was located. At that address, they did not enter the door but someone answering the door phone sent the team to another door in the same block. That was not the right place either, from there the team was sent to the Registry of the Prime Minister's Office, which finally agreed to take in the statements of support on paper. In that livestream, it was also revealed that "Totuuspuoluerp" is the party's Twitter account. Since "rp" stands for "registered party" (rekisteröity puolue), the account had not been used much before as the party was not registered; instead they had reserved the account in advance to prevent someone else from registering it, as happened with their website. They would have liked to have the domain "totuuspuolue.fi" to be their party website, but someone had registered it before just to bully them, which is why they had to go with "totuuspuolue.net".

On April 26, 2023, Finland's Ministry of Justice announced that the party had been registered. Jaana announced this also herself on Instagram, linking to a YLE news item about the matter. That same day, a Wikipedia article about the party was created, and Helsingin Sanomat published an article where Jaana's name is mentioned.

External Links

• Twitter 1
• Twitter 2
• Tokentube
• Instagram
• Website
• Jaana's "Oikeusturvakeskus ry" association's website
• Party website
• Party Youtube channel
• Party Twitter