Greenland's justice minister says government cannot conclude whether genocide occurred in forced contraception program

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

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

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

Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said a "reconciliation commission" would be set up while Danish PM Mette Frederiksen promised the governments would work together.

Denmark has passed a compensation law to pay 300,000 Danish crowns (£34,404; $46,800) to each woman affected by the policy.

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.

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

Use of the birth control was so widespread that Greenland's population growth severely slowed.

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

In 2024, a former prime minister of Greenland, Mute B Egede, described the practice as "genocide".

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".

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.

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

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

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

They added 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.

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 found 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 said the two reports were so different that one "says there was no genocide at all" while the other "says there could have been".

Reacting to the reports on Friday, Frederiksen said: "We will handle the political process together with the government of Greenland. The most important 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.

The Inuit, or mixed Danish and Inuit, make up nearly 90% of the island's population of 56,000.

The birth-control campaign was designed to control the territory's population, which had ballooned since the 1950s, aided by modernisation and better healthcare. This growth, in addition to an increasing rate of teenage pregnancies, had alarmed the Danish authorities.

In 1970, the campaign was considered a "success" as fertility rates had fallen sharply, though the rate continued to fall for some time after that. 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.