Council on Human Rights: Denmark has Violated Greenlanders’ Human Rights

A new DR podcast tells the story of how thousands of Greenlandic girls and women were more or less forced to have contraceptive spirals inserted from 1966 to the mid-1970s, according to KNR.

The official purpose of the Danish campaign was to decrease population growth in Greenland. Danish authorities were worried about there being born too many children outside of wedlock and by women under the age of 20. The population growth also challenged the modernization of Greenland, which thus became mor expensive for the Danish state than originally assumed.

The new DR podcast “The Spiral Campaign” [Spiralkampagnen] has raised strong feelings in Greenland, and Naalakkersuisut Aaja Chemnitz Larsen (IA) has written to the Danish government asking whether it intends to make an official investigation into the matter.

The Danish Minister of Health Magnus Heunicke (S) says to KNR that he has requested the ministry look further into the matter.

The Greenlandic Council on Human Rights argues that the Danish state may have conducted a major violation of human rights through the campaign. “We are shocked that there has been systematic insertion of spirals in Greenlandic girls and women without consent”, the council spokesperson says in a press statement.