ST.-PETERSBURG, October 16 - RAPSI. The Helsinki Administrative Court has upheld the decision to take a newborn child from Russian national Anastasia Zavgorodnyaya, human rights activist Johan Baeckman told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

“The court has refused to return her children to her. It passed four separate judgments on each child,” he said.

The news that the Finnish social services had taken Zavgorodnyaya's four children from her on suspicion of child abuse appeared in media earlier. RIA Novosti reported that her parental rights had been deprived after her six-year-old daughter Veronica told her schoolteacher that she had been beaten.

Several weeks ago, Zavgorodnyaya's three children – Veronica and her two-year-old twins – were sent to a children's home. Last Friday, Zavgorodnyaya's newborn daughter, who was only a week old, was also taken by the Finnish social services.

The Russian Foreign Ministry and Children’s Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov recently became involved in the case.

Baeckman said no charges have been brought against Zavgorodnyaya, stressing that the decision to take the children was made based on the eldest daughter’s allegation that she was “spanked.”

Baeckman added that Veronica “was pressured at the Finnish police station where they forced her to testify against her parents.” According to him, the head of the Vantaa custody service allegedly told Finnish media that the decision is being made “to take all of Anastasia's children.”

RIA Novosti has yet to receive a confirmation of this statement from the Finnish authorities.

Zavgorodnyaya has been allowed to live with her children in a social security center.

After a new law came into effect in Finland in mid-2008 stating that children should be taken from their families immediately in situations when abuse is suspected, many such cases have arisen.

Russian-Finnish families such as the Rantalas, the Salonens and the Putknonens, for example, have found themselves in similar circumstances.

The Salonen family's case was one of the first public scandals to break out over Russian-Finnish children.

After Rimma Salonen brought her son Anton to Russia, he was taken back to Finland in the trunk of a diplomat's car by his father Paavo Salonen and diplomat Simo Pietilainen, who have escaped criminal liability in Finland. Rimma Salonen was deprived of her parental rights by a Finnish court and received a suspended sentence for abducting her son after her divorce from Paavo.

Astakhov spared no effort in trying to help Salonen and her son, whose Russian citizenship has not been recognized by the Finish authorities. Paavo has taken Russia and Astakhov to the European Court of Human Rights in an effort to force them to stop commenting on Anton's case.

Anton lives in Finland with his 70-year old father, who is his sole guardian.