NUUK, Greenland — A decades-long dark chapter of colonial-era medical abuse against Indigenous Inuit women in Greenland is back in the global spotlight, after two commissioned investigative reports released Friday delivered conflicting conclusions on whether the systematic forced contraception program carried out by Danish health authorities qualifies as an act of genocide under international law.
The inquiry, commissioned by the self-governing Greenlandic government, was tasked with evaluating the program against the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention, which explicitly classifies imposing measures designed to prevent births within a protected group as an act of genocide. Over the decades of the program running from the 1960s through the early 1990s, an estimated 4,000 Greenlandic women and girls — half of all fertile women on the Arctic island at the time — were fitted with non-consensual intrauterine devices (IUDs), or given unwanted hormonal birth control injections. Survivors who testified to investigators, more than 350 in total, include girls as young as 12 years old, many of whom had no information about the procedure before it was performed and never gave legal or informed consent.
Public exposure of the abuse, dubbed the “spiral case” after the coiled shape of common IUDs, has triggered widespread outrage in both Denmark and Greenland over the past several years. The program was openly designed to curb rapid population growth among Greenland’s Indigenous population at the time, when improvements to living conditions and basic healthcare led to a natural population increase. Greenland did not take control of its own healthcare system from Denmark until January 1, 1992, when the program officially ended.
In recent years, Danish officials have taken formal steps toward accountability: last year, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen issued a formal national apology to survivors, and this week the Danish government approved a 300,000 Danish kroner (approximately $46,500) compensation payout to every confirmed victim of the program. Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen announced Friday that a national reconciliation commission will be established to continue addressing the harm of the program, a move Frederiksen publicly endorsed.
The four-person investigative panel split into two factions months before the public release, producing two separate reports with opposing core findings. The Greenlandic government only accepted one of the two reports Friday, noting that the second report — which issued a definitive finding that no genocide occurred — failed to meet established international scientific and investigative standards. The rejected report, led by a former director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, argued that there was no empirical evidence proving any Danish or Greenlandic authority or medical professional intended to destroy the Greenlandic population as a group, and thus concluded “there was no genocide.”
In contrast, the accepted report declined to issue a definitive ruling on genocide. Its authors wrote that they were unable to confirm genocidal intent based solely on an investigation of the forced contraception program, and called for further inquiry that would also examine other harmful Danish colonial policies targeting Greenlandic children and families during the same era. Unlike the opposing faction, the accepted report did not rule out the finding of genocide, noting: “It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which an attempt to substantially reduce the population of a single ethnic group could not constitute an intent to destroy, in part, that ethnicity.”
In its public announcement of the split findings, the Greenlandic government cited “professional disagreements amongst the members and, to some extent, concerns about the geopolitical situation” as the core causes of the panel’s division. The government did not elaborate on what specific geopolitical concerns the dissenting authors referenced. The release of the conflicting reports comes amid a fresh period of geopolitical attention on the Arctic island, after former U.S. President Donald Trump publicly pushed to acquire full U.S. control over Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Both Greenlandic and Danish leaders rejected the proposal, affirming that only the people of Greenland can determine their own political future.