Jaana Kavonius

Jaana Kavonius 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.

External Links

• Twitter
• Tokentube
• Website
• Mainstream tabloid Ilta-Sanomat mentions Jaana Kavonius