Greenland Can't Say if Denmark's Birth-Control Programme Was Genocide
Greenland's government has said it cannot decide whether genocide took place during a decades-long Danish birth-control programme that targeted Inuit women and girls. The announcement came on August 28, 2026, after a group of four experts split into two opposing teams and produced rival reports BBC News.
The programme was run by Danish doctors who inserted thousands of Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine devices, or IUDs. An IUD is a small device placed inside the uterus to prevent pregnancy. National archives show that between 1966 and 1970 alone, 4,500 women and girls — some as young as 13 — received IUDs. The campaign, known as the "Spiral Campaign," ran from the 1960s through the 1990s and affected roughly 4,000 women, according to Georgetown University's Center for Human Rights Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. In recent years, many women have said they were given the devices without their knowledge or permission. The practice was so widespread that Greenland's population growth slowed dramatically BBC News.
A year earlier, in August 2024, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologised to the affected women and their families for what she called "systematic discrimination." Denmark passed a law giving each woman affected by the policy 300,000 Danish crowns (about £34,404 or $46,800). In 2024, Greenland's former Prime Minister Mute B Egede went further, calling the forced contraception practice "genocide" BBC News.
Greenland had asked four experts to answer two questions: were human rights violated, and did those violations amount to genocide under international law? The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — a 1948 agreement that defines what counts as genocide worldwide — includes "imposing measures intended to prevent births" within a specific group as one form of the crime. The panel could not agree. Two members resigned and wrote their own separate report BBC News.
The two experts who stayed, Alaskan lawyer Dalee Sambo Dorough and University of Copenhagen law professor Miriam Cullen, found that the rights of Inuit women in Greenland had been violated. But they could not conclude that genocide had occurred "on the basis of contraceptive practices alone." They said a court might still find that Denmark had genocidal intent if it looked at other evidence, such as the removal of Inuit children to be raised by Danish families BBC News.
The other two experts, Jonas Christoffersen (former head of the Danish Institute for Human Rights) and psychologist Jensine Nedergaard, agreed that women had been wronged but could not determine how widespread the mistreatment was. They found no evidence that "any authority or health professional at any time had any intention of destroying the Greenlandic population" BBC News.
Greenland's justice minister pointed out the gap between the two reports: one "says there was no genocide at all" and the other "says there could have been." The government released the reports through its Ministry of Children, Youth, Legislation and Equality and held a press conference on August 28, 2026 naalakkersuisut.gl.
Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said a "reconciliation commission" — a body designed to help two sides address past wrongs together — would be set up. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen promised the two governments would cooperate. By creating this commission, both governments are choosing to handle the unresolved questions through diplomacy rather than through the courts, at least for now.
The bigger picture here is about Greenland's history as a Danish colony and its gradual push for more self-government. Denmark ruled Greenland for centuries, and the territory is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark but governs many of its own affairs. The split among the experts, and the Greenlandic government's choice not to take a firm position, means the genocide question has no clear legal answer. Whether a court or the new reconciliation commission picks up the loose ends identified by Dorough and Cullen — especially the evidence about Inuit children removed from their families — will shape what happens next. The disagreement between the expert teams also shows how hard it is to prove genocidal intent years later, when the written records are disputed and the policies stretched across decades of colonial rule.
