Greenland will form a reconciliation commission on forced contraception

Greenland will set up a truth and reconciliation commission on the decades-long campaign of forced contraception against Inuit women and girls. Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen announced the step on Friday after two expert reports, commissioned by Nuuk, agreed that the programme violated human rights and disagreed on whether it met the legal test for genocide.

Justice Minister Marianne Paviasen told reporters the government would not say, on its own authority, that genocide had occurred. “This is something we can continue to debate,” she said. Nielsen said the commission should uncover facts with a view to reconciliation rather than assign blame. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen welcomed the idea and said she would read the reports.

A joint Danish-Greenlandic inquiry last year found that, from the 1960s into later decades, at least 4,000 Greenlandic Inuit women and girls received intrauterine devices or contraceptive injections, often without consent or knowledge. National archive figures for 1966 to 1970 alone record about 4,500 insertions, some in girls as young as 12 or 13. Investigators have heard from more than 350 women. Some later suffered infections, scarring of the fallopian tubes or removal of the uterus. Some could not have children.

Why the panel split

Greenland asked a four-member group in 2024 to test the facts against the 1948 Genocide Convention, which lists measures intended to prevent births within a group. Two members resigned during the work and filed a separate report. One report said genocide could not be established from contraceptive practice alone. The other said Denmark breached the convention by failing to act on a risk of genocide, while still stopping short of a courtroom finding of intent.

Both reports found a breach of the right to private and family life and, in some cases, degrading treatment. That is enough for a compensation scheme. It is not enough for the word that activists have asked the two governments to use.

Denmark apologised last year. On Thursday the Danish parliament approved payments of 300,000 kroner, about $46,500, to each recognised victim. Greenland took over its own health service on 1 January 1992. The insertions at issue happened under Danish administration.

The political setting is larger than the IUDs

The reports land while Washington talks about Greenland as a strategic prize and while Iceland votes on Europe. For Nuuk the commission is a domestic instrument. It will collect testimony, set a public record and sit beside the Danish payments. It will not, on Paviasen’s account, issue a government verdict of genocide.

Intent remains the unsettled legal point. The convention requires it. The experts said a court might infer it from a wider file that includes the removal of Inuit children to Danish families, evidence they were not asked to weigh in full. That sentence keeps the argument alive. The commission Nielsen described will have to decide how much of that wider file it is willing to open.