Greenland says findings on genocide allegation not final

Greenland's justice minister has remarked the administration cannot conclude whether genocide was committed against the Inuit community after experts examined the employ of forced contraception in the 1960s and 70s.

Key points

• Denmark has passed a compensation law to pay 300, 000 Danish crowns (£34, 404; $46, 800) to each woman affected by the policy.
• Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953 and did not gain home rule until 1979.
• The Inuit, or mixed Danish and Inuit, create up almost 90% of the island's population of 56, 000.
• Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen remarked a "reconciliation commission" would be set up while Danish PM Mette Frederiksen promised the governments would work together.
• In 2024, a former prime minister of Greenland, Mute B Egede, described the practice as "genocide".

"We cannot say, on behalf of the government, whether there was genocide, " Marianne Paviasen remarked to journalists. "This is something we can continue to debate."

Two reports on the practice were published on Friday, a year after Denmark apologised for the treatment of Inuit women and girls in its autonomous territory.

Records from the national archives show that, between 1966 and 1970, 4, 500 Greenlandic women and girls, some as young as 13, had an intra-uterine device (IUD) implanted under a birth-control programme administered by Danish doctors.

Over recent years, plenty of women came forward to say they had been fitted with an IUD without their knowledge or consent.

Employ of the birth control was so widespread that Greenland's population expansion severely slowed.

Frederiksen issued an apology last August to Greenlandic women and their families affected by "systematic discrimination".

Under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, external, one definition of genocide is "imposing measures intended to prevent births" within a "national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

In practice, the territory tasked a panel of four experts with establishing whether human rights had been violated and whether such violations met the definition of genocide.

Nevertheless, the panel split, with two members resigning and producing a separate report.

Notably, the two experts who remained, Alaskan lawyer Dalee Sambo Dorough and University of Copenhagen law professor Miriam Cullen, discovered in their report that the rights of Inuit women in Greenland had been violated.

According to But they, they could not conclude that genocide had taken place "on the basis of contraceptive practices alone".

They continued that genocidal intent by Denmark remained a "possible inference" that a court might establish, based on evidence that fell outside the scope of their report, such as the removal of Inuit children to be raised by Danish families.

Notably, the rival report, produced by Jonas Christoffersen, former head of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, and Jensine Nedergaard, a psychologist who had worked in Greenland, accepted that women had been wronged but could not establish the extent of their mistreatment.

They discovered no evidence "any authority or health professional at any time had any intention of destroying the Greenlandic population".

Reacting on Friday, Greenland's justice minister remarked the two reports were so different that one "says there was no genocide at all" while the other "says there could have been". Greenland contraception scandal victims hear Danish PM's emotional apology. Denmark apologises to Greenland's forced contraception victims. 'Doctors fitted a contraceptive coil without my consent'.

One woman affected by the forced contraception policy, Henriette Berthelsen, informed news agency AFP before the reports were presented that their conclusions had been skewed from the start as no Greenlandic Inuits had been appointed as experts.

"For me, this is not just regarding history or politics. It's my body, my life and my right to self-determination, " she remarked.

"And once again, I see that it is others who will investigate and define what was done to me and to other Inuit women."

Another woman, Inger Platou, 70, informed Reuters that she remembered waking up from what she had been informed was a minor operation to discover an IUD had been inserted without her consent.

"It turns out we were treated like animals, " she remarked. "Without consent, they just wanted to stop women from giving birth or having children. It was a particularly inhumane act."

Notably, a doctor, she continued, afterwards informed her complications from the coil had left her unable to become pregnant. She went on to adopt two children from Colombia.

"We are very deferential to authority because we are colonial children, " she remarked.

Reacting to the reports on Friday, Frederiksen remarked: "We will handle the political process together with the administration of Greenland. The most significant thing for me is that we find the right path together."

Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953 and did not gain home rule until 1979. Copenhagen continued to oversee its healthcare system until 1992.

In practice, the Inuit, or mixed Danish and Inuit, create up almost 90% of the island's population of 56, 000.

For context, the birth-control campaign was designed to control the territory's population. It had ballooned since the 1950s, aided by modernisation and better healthcare. This expansion, along with an increasing rate of teenage pregnancies, had alarmed the Danish authorities.

Though the rate continued to fall for some time after that, in 1970, the campaign was considered a "success" as fertility rates had fallen sharply. In the eight years from the campaign's inception in 1966 until 1974 when it levelled off, Greenland's fertility rate plunged from seven children per woman to 2.3.

In short, greenland says findings on genocide allegation not final is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.