Greenland splits on genocide finding after forced contraception probe

Between 1966 and 1970, Danish doctors inserted intrauterine devices into roughly 4,500 Greenlandic women and girls without their knowledge or consent. Some of the girls were as young as thirteen. The campaign worked—Greenland's fertility rate collapsed from seven children per woman to 2.3 over eight years. The population stopped growing the way Copenhagen had feared it would. Last August, Denmark apologized for what it called systematic discrimination. This August, two expert reports landed on the question everyone wanted answered: was this genocide?

Greenland's justice minister, Marianne Paviasen, stood before reporters and said the government could not say. The experts had split. Two of them—Dalee Sambo Dorough, an Alaskan lawyer, and Miriam Cullen, a law professor at the University of Copenhagen—found that Inuit women's rights had been violated. But they could not conclude that genocide had occurred based on the contraceptive practices alone. They noted, however, that genocidal intent remained a possible inference a court might establish, drawing on evidence outside their scope: the removal of Inuit children to be raised by Danish families.

The other two experts—Jonas Christoffersen, former head of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, and Jensine Nedergaard, a psychologist who had worked in Greenland—produced a different conclusion. They acknowledged the women had been wronged but said they found no evidence that any authority or health professional had intended to destroy the Greenlandic population. The two reports were so far apart that one seemed to say genocide did not happen at all, while the other suggested it might have.

Under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, one definition covers imposing measures intended to prevent births within a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The question was whether Denmark had done this deliberately, with genocidal intent, or whether the campaign was simply a misguided effort to manage population growth that had alarmed Copenhagen. Greenland was still under Danish control—it had been a colony until 1953, did not gain home rule until 1979, and Denmark ran its healthcare system until 1992. The Inuit, or people of mixed Danish and Inuit descent, made up nearly ninety percent of the island's 56,000 residents.

Inger Platou, seventy years old, remembered waking from what she had been told was a minor operation to find an IUD had been placed inside her without permission. A doctor later told her the device had caused complications that left her unable to have children. She adopted two children from Colombia instead. "It turns out we were treated like animals," she said. "Without consent, they just wanted to stop women from giving birth or having children. It was a very inhumane act." Henriette Berthelsen, another woman affected by the policy, pointed out that no Greenlandic Inuits had been appointed to the expert panel. "For me, this is not just about history or politics," she told the news agency AFP. "It's my body, my life and my right to self-determination. And once again, I see that it is others who will investigate and define what was done to me and to other Inuit women."

Denmark has passed a compensation law offering 300,000 Danish crowns—roughly 34,404 pounds, or 46,800 dollars—to each woman affected. Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said a reconciliation commission would be established. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen promised the two governments would work together. But the central question—whether what happened was genocide—remained unresolved. The expert panel's division meant that Greenland's government could not make that determination on its own. The story now moves into a political process, one in which the two governments will have to find common ground on how to name what occurred and what comes next.