The Finnish Medical Research Act (No 488/1999) entered into force in the autumn of 1999. The Finnish Medical Research Act includes provisions on the protection of the rights of the research subjects and the responsibilities of ethics committees.
The ethical principles of informed consent and the primacy of the rights of an individual are laid down in the act. All research projects governed by the act must be reviewed by an ethics committee. Ethics committees review research proposals with a view to the appropriateness of the trial and its planning, as well as the appropriateness of the assessment of its benefits and risks and the justifiability of any conclusions regarding them.
The researcher in charge of carrying out the trial in practice must be a medical doctor or a dentist with adequate professional or scientific qualifications.