Current affairs

Minister for Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen will attend a virtual Nordic foreign ministers’ meeting in N5 format on 23 August.

Heads of Finland’s missions abroad and foreign policy leaders will meet again at the Annual Meeting of Heads of Mission in Helsinki on 21–23 August.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen will visit Oslo in Norway and Copenhagen in Denmark on 11 August. The Minister visits the two countries for the first time.

United States President Joseph Biden’s visit to Helsinki attracted a great deal of attention in the international media. The visit was mentioned in nearly 18,000 online media articles between 1 and 17 July 2023. Although a significant number of the articles focused on President Biden, Finland also got its share of the visibility.

Finland will assume the presidency of the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) on 1 July 2023 for one year.

As of 15 May, the email addresses of the staff members at Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and missions abroad will be, as a rule, in the format [email protected]. The change is part of the overall harmonisation of the Government’s email addresses.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs completes Finland’s relief effort in Sudan on Thursday 27 April.

On 4 April, Minister for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto will deposit Finland's instrument of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty. Minister Haavisto will deposit the instrument of accession in Brussels with the Government of the United States. Finland will become a NATO member country at the moment of the deposit. Minister Haavisto will also represent Finland at the meeting of NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs starting on the same day.

A total of 42,198 eligible voters cast their vote in advance at Finland’s missions and offices abroad in this year’s parliamentary elections.

On 23 March 2023, President of the Republic Sauli Niinistö decided that Finland would commit itself to the North Atlantic Treaty and the Ottawa Agreement, which were accepted by Parliament on 1 March 2023. The presenting minister was Minister for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto. The President of the Republic also confirmed the acts bringing into force the Treaty and the Agreement.