The Greenland Contraception Cases

The case

In August 2026, the Independent Expert Group appointed by Naalakkersuisut, the Government of Greenland, published the Independent Report into the Human Rights Aspects of Contraceptive Practices in Kalaallit Nunaat Since 1960, authored by Dalee Sambo Dorough and Miriam Cullen. The report examines contraceptive practices in Greenland since 1960, including the mass insertion of intrauterine devices in Inuit women and girls, and assesses them against the human rights standards that Denmark, as the state responsible, is bound to uphold.

The practices examined affected an estimated 4,500 Inuit women and girls, some of them aged 12, between the 1960s and 1991, and coincided with a fall in Greenland's birth rate from around seven to between two and three children per woman. After women began speaking publicly in 2022, Greenland and Denmark commissioned a historical investigation, and in December 2024 Naalakkersuisut appointed the Expert Group. In parallel, 143 women brought claims against the Danish state. Our submission was one of only 11 received, and is the report's most frequently cited source.

Our research

Our research on the Greenland cases examines how historical reproductive harm can be addressed through human rights law — from individual claims before courts to collective remedies such as apologies, compensation and reparations. It draws on the European Court of Human Rights case law on consent, ill-treatment, positive obligations and remedies, and on comparative experience from Peru, Canada and beyond.

This work appears in several publications. Our article The Greenlandic Forced Contraception Cases: Apologies, Compensation and Beyond (Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, with Ula A. Kos and Edward Pérez) situates the cases within the wider landscape of apologies and compensation for historical reproductive harm, while our Spanish-language work brings the analysis to Latin American audiences familiar with forced sterilisation litigation.

The benchmark our submission later proposed rests on this earlier work. Between 2016 and 2020 Veronika led a large-scale empirical study of how the European Court of Human Rights sets awards for non-pecuniary damage, coding thirteen years of case law on Articles 2, 3 and 5 and interviewing the Court's judges. The study found that awards follow the respondent state — how its conduct is qualified, its wealth, and how often it violates the Convention — far more than the victim's own circumstances, which explain only 0–5% of the variation.

This research also underpinned the expert submission made to the Expert Group by Veronika Fikfak, Ula A. Kos and Edward Pérez. The report draws extensively on that submission, citing it throughout its chapters on discrimination, ill-treatment, and routes to redress.

What the report found

• Intersectional discrimination. A reasonable basis to believe that doctors withheld the full range of contraceptive options from Inuit women and applied so-called "actively motivating techniques" to persuade them to accept the IUD, amounting to intersectional discrimination on grounds of race and sex.
• Inhuman and degrading treatment. A reasonable basis to believe that contraception administered without valid consent caused physical and psychological harm amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment.
• Breaches by Denmark. Denmark breached both its duty to refrain from such treatment and its positive duty to prevent it.

Reparations. The closing chapters set out routes to remedy — domestic proceedings, the European Court of Human Rights, and UN complaints mechanisms — alongside collective reparations, memorialisation and truth-telling, drawing on the experience of Peru and Canada. Our research and expert submission inform much of this discussion, including the analysis of pilot judgments and reparations.

The compensation benchmark

Applying that research, our submission put a figure on what the women should be owed: awards starting at €50,000–60,000 (roughly DKK 375,000–450,000) per woman, higher where discrimination is established, and individualised by age, the type of intervention, whether consent was given or deception used, and long-term harm such as infertility.

The Independent Report takes that figure up. It explains that Strasbourg awards are adjusted for purchasing power, so that a victim in the Danish Realm would receive more than one in Eastern Europe (para. 339), reports our conclusion that awards "would likely be in the vicinity of €50,000 to €60,000", and finds that "the DKK 300,000 that the Danish Government compensation scheme will offer could be lower than the European Court would award" (para. 340).

This matters for what happens next. The flat-rate, tax-free payment of DKK 300,000 agreed in December 2025 and enacted in August 2026 was fixed by political agreement rather than by a legal assessment of the harm. An official, government-commissioned report now establishes that it is a floor rather than full reparation: women whose harm is "only partially redressed" keep their route to the Danish courts and to Strasbourg, and the report concludes that compensation "alone will not address the collective, broader and ongoing societal harms" (para. 334).

What the report recommends

The report's final chapter, "After Compensation and Apology", takes up our submission's central argument that individual compensation alone cannot repair the harm done to the Inuit community, and adopts its proposals:

• Collective reparations. An independent collective reparations fund, separate from any individual compensation, managed by an Inuit or independent body and financing educational, health or cultural projects (para. 373) — the community development fund our submission proposed, drawing on Inter-American practice and in particular Triunfo de la Cruz v Honduras.
• Participation. "The direct, effective, and meaningful participation of the rights holders" in designing and implementing reparations of both individual and collective nature (para. 369).
• Healthcare, training and consent. Strict, monitored informed-consent standards, mandatory training of health professionals, and culturally safe medical, psychological and social support (paras 370–372), modelled on the measures adopted after V.C. v Slovakia and G.M. and Others v Moldova.
• Investigation and memory. The report finds that no investigation meeting the Article 3 standard has taken place, noting that the inquiry itself had no power to call evidence or hear testimony (paras 173–174), and recommends a truth process in which women's testimonies are recorded and permanently preserved, alongside memorialisation (paras 17, 364–367).
• A truth commission. On the day the report was published, the Government of Greenland announced a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Denmark's Prime Minister committed to handling the political process together with the Government of Greenland.

Routes to redress

We continue our research to explore the appropriateness of collective remedies in this and similar cases: going beyond apologies and compensation schemes for individual claimants and thinking about the community, who is entitled to benefit from these, and what standards these remedies must meet to deliver justice for the people affected.