The Ylivieska-Raahe district court awarded the punishment, which also fined EUR 45,000 to the publishing company, court sources said.
Although the prosecutor demanded conditional imprisonment for the editor, the court in its verdict said that JuhaKärkkäinen clearly wrote a kind of anti-Semitic hate speech propaganda, which could not be considered to fall under the right to freedom of expression, and ordered for the financial punishment.
The court also ordered the convict to remove the article from the newspaper website.
Kärkkäinen, however, denied the charges brought against him, saying that his writing was not slanderous or scurrilous.
The newspaper, which has a circulation of over 360,000, has offices in Ylivieska, Lahti and Oulu.
