Publication Policy for Case Law

The decision to publish a case is made by the panel that decides on the case. Published decisions are published on the website at 9.00 a.m.

Precedent

A precedent may be published if it is a decision which is significant for the application of the law in other similar cases or is otherwise of legal significance.

All precedents have their own official record number, but they also have a separate identifier numbering system. The identifiers of precedents are conventionally formatted as, for example, KHO 2026:30, which is intended to be used when referring to decisions in various contexts.

However, on the website of the Supreme Administrative Court and in the Finlex system, a colon has been added between the abbreviation “KHO” (Finnish) or “HFD” (Swedish) and the year in the headings of precedents for search-technical reasons, for example KHO:2026:30. The first colon is not intended to be part of the actual identifier and should not be used in citations.

A precedent’s summary includes the precedent’s decision number, keywords, the date of the decision and record number, case number, ECLI identifier, a summary of the legal issue and the key conclusions of the Supreme Administrative Court, the applicable legal provisions, and the text of the decision. The summary is prepared by the panel that decided the case.

TThe Supreme Administrative Court’s decision is described to the extent necessary for presenting the legal issue. As a rule, the full text of the decision is published unless there are specific reasons for a different procedure (for example, the removal of a section concerning legal aid).

The summary includes the outcome of a vote or the referendary’s dissenting opinion. It also states the names of the chairperson and members of the panel that decided the case, as well as the name of the referendary. If the previous stage of proceedings was before a court or an appellate board, the corresponding names are also mentioned in connection with the description of that decision.

Other published decisions

In the group Other Published Decisions The Supreme Administrative Court publishes decisions that are considered to be socially or otherwise of interest, but which have not been deemed legally significant enought to be published as precedents.

The aforementioned publication criteria is the reason why other published decisions are not evenly distributed across the different subject groups of the Supreme Administrative Court.