Finland

Finland's digital-accessibility regime is the product of two European Union directives transposed onto a deep domestic constitutional and equality-law foundation. Public-sector digital services have been on the hook since 1 April 2019, when the Act on the Provision of Digital Services (Laki digitaalisten palvelujen tarjoamisesta, 306/2019) turned Directive (EU) 2016/2102 into Finnish law just inside the EU deadline. Private-sector products and services followed in April 2023, when the Accessibility Act (Laki eräiden tuotteiden ja palvelujen esteettömyysvaatimuksista, 102/2023) transposed Directive (EU) 2019/882 — with substantive obligations switching on at the EU-wide application date of 28 June 2025. Beneath both sits Section 6 of the Constitution and a Non-Discrimination Act that has carried the heavy lifting on individual cases for a decade.

The constitutional and treaty floor

The 1999 Constitution of Finland (Suomen perustuslaki, 731/1999) makes equality a constitutional right. Section 6, paragraph 2 prohibits unfounded differential treatment on the basis of "sex, age, origin, language, religion, conviction, opinion, health, disability or other reason that concerns his or her person" — disability is named expressly. Section 17, paragraph 3 constitutionally recognises Finnish Sign Language (suomalainen viittomakieli) and Finland-Swedish Sign Language (finlandssvenskt teckenspråk) as languages of users who require them, a recognition added in 1995 to the predecessor Constitution Act and carried forward into the 1999 instrument. The Constitutional Law Committee of Parliament (perustuslakivaliokunta) has treated these clauses as positive obligations on the State and applies them in pre-enactment review of legislation that touches accessibility, sign-language services, or assistive-technology provision.

Finland ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on 11 May 2016, alongside the Optional Protocol — a long process driven by the prior need to bring domestic legislation on the self-determination of persons with intellectual disabilities into conformity with Article 19. Finland entered a reservation on Article 19 (independent living) related to the operation of involuntary measures under the Act on Special Care for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities, with a commitment to lift the reservation once successor legislation is in force. The CRPD entered into force for Finland on 10 June 2016. Article 9 (accessibility), Article 21 (freedom of expression, including sign-language recognition), and Article 33 (national implementation and monitoring) are the most frequently cited articles in Finnish accessibility policy documents. The CRPD Committee's 2024 Concluding Observations on Finland's combined Second and Third Periodic Report flagged the implementation of the EAA, the operation of the conditional-fine mechanism for digital accessibility, and the long-pending reform of disability services legislation as priority items.

Public-sector accessibility: the WAD path via Act 306/2019

Directive (EU) 2016/2102 — the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) — was transposed into Finnish law through the Act on the Provision of Digital Services (Laki digitaalisten palvelujen tarjoamisesta, 306/2019), adopted on 15 March 2019 and largely in force from 1 April 2019. The act consolidates the WAD's accessibility requirements with the long-standing Finnish administrative-law framework on digital service provision by public bodies; it sits in the same statutory family as the Act on Information Management in Public Administration (906/2019) and the Administrative Procedure Act (434/2003).

Act 306/2019 covers every public-sector body in Finland — central government, the 21 wellbeing services counties (hyvinvointialueet, in force since 1 January 2023), municipalities, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Orthodox Church of Finland (in their administrative capacity), state-funded universities and universities of applied sciences, and the publicly-controlled entities falling within the directive's expanded definition of "public sector body". The act additionally extends accessibility obligations to consumer-banking digital services and certain other private-sector digital services even before the EAA took effect — a Finnish go-beyond choice that was unusual in the 2019 EU landscape and that smoothed the eventual transition to the EAA regime.

Three concrete obligations follow:

• Conformance. Digital services must conform to the harmonised European standard EN 301 549 (currently v3.2.1, the version that integrates WCAG 2.1 Level AA). The supervisory authority's guidance fixes the conformance bar at WCAG 2.1 AA pending the formal update of EN 301 549 to track WCAG 2.2.
• Accessibility statement. Each in-scope service must publish, in Finnish and Swedish, a structured accessibility statement (saavutettavuusseloste / tillgänglighetsutlåtande) covering conformance status, scope exclusions, and a complaint mechanism. The statement template follows Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523 verbatim.
• Feedback and enforcement procedure. Users must be able to submit accessibility feedback to the service provider. Unresolved complaints can be escalated to the supervisory authority, which has the power to issue corrective-action orders backed by conditional fines.

The supervising regulator is the Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland (Etelä-Suomen aluehallintovirasto, AVI), with national supervisory competence for the entire country despite its regional name — a Finnish administrative arrangement that concentrates specialised supervisory functions in a single regional agency rather than creating a new national authority. AVI runs the saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi guidance portal, publishes the national monitoring methodology aligned to Commission Decision (EU) 2018/1523, conducts the periodic simplified and in-depth monitoring rounds, and handles individual complaints. AVI's enforcement toolkit centres on the conditional fine (uhkasakko) — an administrative penalty mechanism that allows the supervisor to set a target fine sum, issue a corrective-action order, and convert the fine into an enforceable monetary obligation if the order is not complied with by the deadline. Unlike a one-off administrative fine, the conditional fine can be renewed and escalated for as long as non-compliance continues, which gives AVI substantial leverage without requiring a sequence of fresh proceedings.

The European Commission's biennial WAD implementation reports have placed Finland among the better-performing member states on monitoring infrastructure and accessibility-statement coverage. No EU infringement procedure on the WAD transposition has been opened against Finland.

Private-sector accessibility: the EAA path via Act 102/2023

The European Accessibility Act — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — was transposed into Finnish law as a stand-alone statute: the Act on Accessibility Requirements for Certain Products and Services (Laki eräiden tuotteiden ja palvelujen esteettömyysvaatimuksista, 102/2023), adopted on 27 January 2023 and entered into force in stages. The structural-law provisions (designation of supervisory authorities, registration obligations, conformity-assessment framework) took effect during 2023–24; the substantive obligations on economic operators switched on at the EU-wide application date of 28 June 2025.

Act 102/2023 covers the directive's full product and service scope:

• Products: computer hardware and operating systems, self-service terminals (ATMs, ticket machines, check-in kiosks), consumer terminal equipment with interactive computing capability used to access audiovisual media services, consumer terminal equipment used for electronic communications services, and e-readers.
• Services: electronic communications services, services providing access to audiovisual media services, elements of air-, bus-, rail- and waterborne passenger-transport services, consumer banking services, e-books and dedicated software, and e-commerce services.

The act incorporates the directive's micro-enterprise carve-out: undertakings with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance-sheet total not exceeding €2 million are exempt from the service-side obligations. The transitional period for terminals already in use on 28 June 2025 extends to 28 June 2045 or the end of the terminal's economically-useful life, whichever comes first.

Market surveillance under Act 102/2023 is split across three authorities by sector. Traficom (Liikenne- ja viestintävirasto) — the Transport and Communications Agency — supervises the bulk of the in-scope products (ICT hardware, self-service terminals, e-readers, consumer terminal equipment) and several of the in-scope services (electronic communications, audiovisual-media access services, passenger-transport accessibility information). The Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finanssivalvonta, Fin-FSA) supervises EAA compliance for consumer banking services, applying the EAA's accessibility requirements alongside its prudential and conduct-of-business supervision. AVI takes the remaining service categories — e-commerce, e-books, and the cross-sector boundary cases that don't fit cleanly within Traficom's or Fin-FSA's remit. The three authorities coordinate through a joint working group and share market-surveillance information through the EU's ICSMS system established under Regulation (EU) 2019/1020.

The cross-cutting backstop: the Non-Discrimination Act

The Non-Discrimination Act (Yhdenvertaisuuslaki, 1325/2014) — in force since 1 January 2015 — recognises disability as a protected characteristic and prohibits direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment, instructions to discriminate, and the failure to make reasonable accommodations. Section 15 imposes an explicit duty on authorities, education providers, employers, and providers of goods and services to make reasonable accommodations to enable persons with disabilities to access services on an equal footing; failure to do so is itself a form of discrimination actionable under the act. A 2023 amendment package (1206/2022, in force 1 June 2023) strengthened the act's reach into the provision of goods and services and tightened the reasonable-accommodation obligation.

The act creates two complementary enforcement bodies. The Non-Discrimination Ombudsman (Yhdenvertaisuusvaltuutettu, YVV) is an independent constitutional authority that investigates complaints, issues recommendations, mediates between parties, and can assist individuals in bringing cases to the Tribunal or to court. The National Non-Discrimination and Equality Tribunal (Yhdenvertaisuus- ja tasa-arvolautakunta, YVTltk) is an independent quasi-judicial body that hears complaints, can prohibit discriminatory conduct, can order corrective measures, and can impose conditional fines on respondents that refuse to remedy a finding. The Tribunal's decisions are appealable to the Administrative Court and ultimately to the Supreme Administrative Court (Korkein hallinto-oikeus, KHO).

The Tribunal has built a substantial caseload of digital-accessibility complaints over the last decade. Decisions involving inaccessible online-banking services, inaccessible municipal-administration portals, inaccessible educational-institution learning platforms, and inaccessible e-commerce checkouts have produced both prohibition orders and reasonable-accommodation directions. Where the Tribunal's order is not complied with, a conditional fine of typically €4,000–€20,000 can be set and converted into an enforceable obligation. Civil-court actions for compensation under Section 23 of the act run in parallel, with the District Court hearing the case in the first instance. Compensation is uncapped under Finnish tort law and has typically been awarded in the €1,000–€10,000 range in disability-discrimination cases, with the higher end reserved for cases involving repeated refusals or severe consequences.

Technical standards and conformance

The conformance bar across the public-sector (WAD) and private-sector (EAA) tracks is anchored on the same EU harmonised standard, EN 301 549, currently in force at version 3.2.1. EN 301 549 imports WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its baseline web-content conformance requirement and adds requirements specific to mobile applications, native software, non-web documents, hardware, and communications functionality. The standard's update to integrate WCAG 2.2 is in progress at ETSI and CEN-CENELEC; once published, AVI's monitoring methodology and Traficom's market-surveillance guidance are both expected to track the new version on a transitional schedule.

For EAA-regulated products, the Finnish Government Decree on the conformity-assessment procedures and the EU Declaration of Conformity (issued under Act 102/2023) sets out the technical-file requirements, the form of the Declaration, the CE-marking interaction, and the language regime: declarations may be issued in Finnish, Swedish, or English, with a Finnish or Swedish translation provided on request to the supervisory authority. For services, the EAA's "information for consumers" notice is the lighter analogue — a structured statement in plain Finnish and Swedish describing how the service was made accessible, the conformance standard used, and the complaint mechanism.

For accessibility statements under Act 306/2019, the AVI template tracks Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523 directly. Service providers are required to publish the statement in Finnish and Swedish; the AVI guidance also recommends, but does not require, an English-language version where the service is used by non-Nordic-language audiences. Statements must be machine-readable and reachable from the homepage of the service.

Penalties — the full exposure stack

A common error in compliance budgeting is to read the conditional-fine and administrative-penalty-fee provisions in isolation and conclude that accessibility violations in Finland are cheap. They are not. The administrative-penalty column is the floor of a five-layer exposure stack: (1) conditional fines (uhkasakko) under Acts 306/2019 and 102/2023 and the Non-Discrimination Act; (2) administrative penalty fees under Act 102/2023 for EAA non-compliance; (3) civil compensation under the Non-Discrimination Act, uncapped under Finnish tort law; (4) public-procurement disqualification under the Act on Public Procurement and Concession Contracts (1397/2016); and (5) EU Commission infringement procedures against the Finnish state for systemic non-implementation. Below, all figures are presented in euros.

Layer 1 — conditional fines and administrative penalty fees

The EAA's Article 30 obliges every member state to set penalties that are "effective, proportionate, and dissuasive" — language the European Court of Justice has interpreted to require maxima sufficient to alter the cost-benefit calculation of large operators, not just nominal fines that get treated as a cost of doing business. The WAD's Article 9 imposes the same proportionality test on the public-sector side. Finland's transposition uses two distinct administrative-penalty instruments: the long-standing uhkasakko conditional-fine framework under the Act on Conditional Imposition of a Fine (1113/1990), available to both AVI under Act 306/2019 and the three EAA supervisors under Act 102/2023; and a separate administrative penalty fee (hallinnollinen seuraamusmaksu) introduced under Act 102/2023 for EAA non-compliance.

Finland's administrative-penalty headline figures sit at the lower-to-middle end of the EU-wide spread. By way of comparison: Germany's BFSG §37 caps single-incident fines at €100,000; France's 2023 transposition ordinance allows administrative fines up to €50,000 per non-conforming product with per-day penalties for ongoing non-compliance; Spain's Ley 11/2023 sets a graduated framework reaching €1,000,000 for "very serious" infringements; Italy's transposition (D.Lgs. 82/2022) caps at €40,000; and the Netherlands has signalled exposure of up to 5% of annual turnover for systemic violations. Finland's comparatively modest headline figures are deceptive: the renewable nature of the conditional fine and the ability to stack the EAA administrative penalty fee on top of an uhkasakko mean that sustained non-compliance can accumulate exposure well above the per-incident headline.

Layer 2 — civil compensation under the Non-Discrimination Act (uncapped)

Beyond the administrative-penalty track, complainants under the Non-Discrimination Act may pursue civil claims for compensation under Section 23 of the act. Finnish tort law sets no statutory cap on compensation in discrimination cases — the courts assess damages by reference to the severity of the breach, the duration of the discriminatory conduct, the size and resources of the respondent, and the broader public-interest implications of the case. Awards in disability-discrimination cases over the last decade have typically fallen in the €1,000–€10,000 range per claimant, with a small number of high-profile cases reaching €20,000+ where the discriminatory effect on a class of users was well-documented. The civil-court route is the higher-exposure pathway for cases involving named individual claimants, especially where the Equality Tribunal has already issued a substantive prohibition that strengthens the evidentiary basis of the civil claim.

Layer 3 — public-procurement disqualification

The Finnish Act on Public Procurement and Concession Contracts (Laki julkisista hankinnoista ja käyttöoikeussopimuksista, 1397/2016) transposes the EU Procurement Directives and requires contracting authorities to consider accessibility from the technical-specification stage onward. The act allows discretionary exclusion of bidders that have been found to have committed grave professional misconduct — a category that the Finnish Market Court has accepted includes adjudicated accessibility-related discrimination findings and significant administrative-penalty findings under Act 102/2023. For vendors selling into the Finnish public sector and the 21 wellbeing services counties, the loss of bid eligibility on an active procurement (typical contract values run €1 million to several tens of millions of euros) routinely exceeds the administrative penalty that triggered the disqualification by one to two orders of magnitude.

Layer 4 — class-action and collective-redress exposure

Finland's collective-redress framework was significantly expanded by the Act on Representative Actions for the Protection of the Collective Interests of Consumers (1147/2022), in force from 25 June 2023, which transposed the EU Representative Actions Directive (EU) 2020/1828. The act allows designated qualified entities — including consumer-protection organisations and equality-promotion organisations — to bring collective claims on behalf of affected consumers. A digital service that systematically excludes a class of users with disabilities can give rise to a representative action seeking both injunctive relief and compensation. The 2023–25 caseload under the act is still developing; the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority (KKV) has flagged digital-services accessibility as one of the priority areas where representative actions are anticipated.

Layer 5 — EU Commission infringement procedures (state-level)

The largest exposure number in the EU accessibility landscape is not a fine on a business — it is the lump-sum and daily penalty the Court of Justice of the European Union can impose on a member state under Article 260(2) TFEU for failing to transpose or enforce an EU directive. The 2025 Commission communication on financial sanctions sets the indicative minimum lump-sum payment for failure to comply with a previous CJEU judgment at approximately €1,776,000 for Finland, with daily penalty payments calculated from a base of approximately €2,000–€13,500 per day multiplied by severity and duration coefficients. No WAD or EAA infringement procedure is currently open against Finland; the credible 2026–28 risk sits in the EAA implementation track if any of the three sectoral supervisors materially underperforms during the first surveillance cycle. The pressure of an open Commission infringement procedure routinely produces a step-change in how aggressively the national regulator uses its existing administrative-penalty powers.

Enforcement record and outlook

Public-sector enforcement under Act 306/2019 has been steady and methodical. AVI's monitoring methodology produces twice-yearly simplified scans of approximately 7,500 in-scope digital services and a smaller in-depth-scan tranche of around 90 services per cycle. Findings of non-conformance trigger remedial-action orders in the first instance, with conditional fines reserved for cases where the in-scope body refuses to engage or misses a corrective-action deadline. Several high-profile conditional-fine decisions against municipalities, wellbeing services counties, and central-government agencies were issued during 2023–25, with AVI publishing summary decisions on the saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi portal. The first cohort of WAD conditional-fine decisions appealed to the Administrative Court has produced a roughly even split between full upholding and partial reduction.

Private-sector enforcement under the EAA-implementing Act 102/2023 began on 28 June 2025 and is still in its first surveillance cycle as of mid-2026. Traficom's market-surveillance programme prioritises (per its published 2025–2026 work plan): electronic-communications-service accessibility, e-reader and consumer terminal equipment placed on the Finnish market, self-service ticketing kiosks at major transport hubs, and audiovisual-media access services. Fin-FSA's banking-services surveillance focuses on the digital-banking platforms of the major Finnish banks and the operations of payment-service providers under PSD2. AVI's EAA strand prioritises e-commerce checkout accessibility and e-book platform accessibility. The first round of administrative-penalty-fee decisions under the EAA-implementing provisions is expected through the second half of 2026; current expectation in the regulatory community is that the supervisors will give regulated entities a short formal grace period (typically a 60-day corrective-action window) before assessing penalty fees, except in cases of egregious or repeated non-compliance.

The Tribunal's caseload on digital-inaccessibility-as-discrimination has been the most active enforcement strand of the three over the last decade. Decisions in 2024 and 2025 against major Finnish retail banks, several municipal-administration portals, and a national online-pharmacy platform are now in the appeal phase before the Administrative Court and the Supreme Administrative Court. The general pattern is that the Tribunal's substantive findings of discrimination are upheld more often than not, with the courts intervening primarily on the proportionality of the conditional fine and on the question of how rapidly the respondent must remedy the inaccessibility.

What's coming in 2026–27

Three concrete developments to watch. First, the Government Decree under Act 102/2023 setting the detailed technical-file content requirements and the procedure for designating notified bodies under the EAA's conformity-assessment regime is being operationalised through 2026, with Traficom expected to publish a comprehensive market-surveillance guidance document by Q4 2026. Second, AVI has announced (April 2026) an updated national accessibility methodology designed to align Finland's WAD monitoring with WCAG 2.2 once EN 301 549 formally tracks the new version. Third, the long-pending Finnish disability-services reform — combining the Act on Disability Services and the Act on Special Care for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities into a single statute — is in its final parliamentary stage and, once enacted, is expected to allow Finland to withdraw its reservation on CRPD Article 19.

On the international-monitoring side, Finland's next periodic report to the CRPD Committee is due in 2028, and accessibility implementation under both the WAD and the EAA pathways will feature prominently in the next Concluding Observations cycle. The VANE-coordinated national CRPD action plan, refreshed in 2024 against the Committee's most recent observations, is the policy document that lines up implementation across all relevant administrations (AVI, Traficom, Fin-FSA, the Ombudsman, the Tribunal) and against which the next CRPD review will measure progress.