Across the globe, Indigenous peoples looking to protect their land, resources, and culture from green energy projects are turning to the same multifaceted entity to help them: the United Nations.
The international arena makes sense. With little recourse in the courts systems of the countries that colonized them, the U.N. provides an important legal pathway, especially when it comes to development projects in Indigenous homelands.
This dynamic has become increasingly visible in the Nordic nations, where a public reputation for respecting human rights has clashed with those countries’ treatment of Indigenous Sámi peoples: In Norway, the government has had to pay millions for violating the rights of Sámi reindeer herders by illegally building a massive onshore wind park, while in Sweden, a proposed iron mine threatens to upend Sámi protections of a UNESCO world heritage site that is also critical to supporting traditional culture and livelihoods.
And just last week, two different U.N. committees found that Finland violated the rights of the Sámi by granting mineral exploration permits in Finnish Sápmi — the homelands of the Sámi peoples that cross Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
The decisions, released by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, found that Finland violated the rights of the Sámi, specifically their right to culture and land, by granting exploration permits without conducting an impact assessment or securing the community’s free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC — an international legal statute that requires states to cooperate with Indigenous peoples when adopting legislation, or undertaking projects, that could affect their rights.
The case was brought to the U.N. by three Sámi sisters, aged 13, 15 and 16 at the time of the first filing in 2021 after the Geological Survey of Finland, a government agency, applied for permits to explore for gold, copper, and iron in Sámi reindeer herding areas. In the years since, applications to survey for transition minerals like nickel, copper, and cobalt have also been filed.
The three sisters are members of a reindeer herding family from the Kova-Labba Siida, a traditional reindeer herding village. Siidas make up a larger herding cooperative and are critical units when it comes to collective decision-making in the area. According to the sisters and the Sámi Parliament — the representative body for Sámi peoples in Finland — while the state’s geological agency met with that reindeer herding cooperative to discuss the permits, they did not meet with members of the siida, effectively sidestepping traditional governance structures.
On Thursday, those arguments were endorsed by the U.N., with experts writing: “The granting of the permit despite their consistent opposition and in the absence of impact assessment, infringes their right to preserve their identity as Sámi.”
Grist spoke with Näkkäläjärvi about what the recent findings could mean for Indigenous rights and climate change. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. It seems pretty clear that the state would not have received the free, prior, and informed consent of the community to begin these mining projects. However, if they were to at least engage in good faith, what should they have been doing?
A. Finnish law stipulates that authorities should do an impact assessment and do it properly. But we’ve seen for over 10 years, maybe 15, that the authorities are not doing it, and that’s one of the issues at the center of these cases as well: It’s been the assessment of the Sámi parliament in Finland for a long time that proper impact assessments are systematically not conducted for mining projects. Perhaps also there’s limited capability on the authorities’ side to do them effectively: They don’t understand Sámi culture, especially reindeer herding.
Another issue is that although the authorities claim that they have conducted an FPIC process and they have heard from, for example, the reindeer herding cooperative, it is not enough, especially where traditional Sámi reindeer herding is practiced. Traditional reindeer herding is a way of organizing work and is a way of making decisions. It is based on these siida units, which are family units usually, and are smaller units than the reindeer herding cooperatives. Finland’s laws fail to recognize those traditional structures and they fail to listen to the siidas and their participants.
The result is that Finland is now violating Indigenous rights and International human rights conventions and one of the recent U.N. decisions says that FPIC should reach all the way to the siida level, that under international law it should be done that way. That is great because for decades we’ve been trying to get our traditional Sámi reindeer herding recognized in Finnish legislation, and perhaps this will help in that effort.
Q. You say that authorities may not be culturally competent to handle these impact assessments. What, for example, would they see if they engaged more fully with communities and took a more comprehensive approach?
A. We’re talking about an Indigenous culture that has a strong connection to the land. It’s not just a livelihood, everything is connected to everything: Our livelihoods carry our family languages, our culture, our customs. In one of the decisions, it was described that the children in question are learning our handicrafts, joiking, which is our singing tradition, and these traditions also in turn carry the traditional knowledge of our livelihoods. Everything is so holistically connected that you should have this kind of review when you make an impact assessment, and I think this is the capability that unfortunately is lacking on the authorities’ side.
Hopefully these findings will help them to understand, first of all, that FPIC is real and you have to do it, and that in an Indigenous culture it is truly holistic and you have to consider different perspectives and speak to the relevant units.
This is actually a recurring theme, for example, when we’ve been speaking with the Finnish military. Now that Finland is part of NATO and we have seen NATO military exercises here in the north, the military struggles to understand who they need to speak with and negotiate with. It’s not enough to speak with the reindeer herding cooperative. While they are very much like an administrative umbrella organization, the real work and real decisions are made in the siida units. It’s our way of organizing and it’s a centuries-old system that’s alive in our reindeer herding communities, but the authorities fail to recognize it.
Q. The complaint makes clear that while these projects are linked to the green transition, they also compound the effects of climate change.
A. We are suffering from the impacts of climate change here. Everything is changing so fast: Our winters are changing, our summers are changing, and temperatures are rising three to four times faster than the global average. But we also suffer from the mitigation efforts, the so-called green transition, which means that nation-states are trying to open mines and build windmills in our territories. It’s a double burden, especially on our traditional livelihoods, not just reindeer herding. It’s fishing, hunting, handicrafts gathering; they all suffer from climate change and then we suffer from the large-scale industrial projects that are imposed on us. We think that this is wrong because our actions have done little to cause climate change, and in contrast, we’ve been trying to preserve and safeguard our lands for the next generations. It feels ironic that now that the Western world has failed to look over its environment and its nature, they then turn their eyes to our air, our land, and our territory that we’ve been protecting for centuries and we pay the price.
Q. What are the next steps in this process?
A. We just got these decisions so we are analyzing what it means, but one of the actions that we hope the state parties will take from this is that FPIC needs to be respected and implemented in all decision-making that concerns mining legislation, the associated agencies, and in the courts. We’re also looking into the required changes to Finnish legislation because one of the decisions says that Finland should start an amendment of legislation to recognize Sami collective land rights. So I think these decisions are huge, they are really landmark decisions here in Finland and can have a big impact. Maybe this opens the eyes of the authorities and the government and parliament to understand what FPIC really means.
Q. But because U.N. decisions are essentially impossible to enforce, the next steps require a government that’s open to engaging with these decisions?
A. Yes, that’s correct. When we start analyzing these decisions and exploring what other immediate actions we can push for, we’ll need to look at the wider, more long-term impacts, and whether there are some changes that are needed to mining legislation, or if it’s more a question of the various bodies and authorities to actually start implementing FPIC in accordance with existing law. But we have very good connections to the Finnish government. In the last administration we had Sanna-Marin’s left-wing government and they were very friendly to many of our causes and open to support many of our objectives — but in reality, it was very difficult to push improvements. Our efforts now are proceeding very well under this current conservative government. We are looking at movement and some improvement, but it’s going to be interesting to see what the lawyers say when they have had time to think about these new decisions.
Q. What are the wider implications of these decisions for Indigenous peoples outside of Finland?
A. I think these cases and the decisions really shed light to the very basic things that we have always known: that Indigenous peoples have inherent rights. We’ve always had them. We will have them after the nation-states fail, and we have to remember that we have to defend those rights, court by court and case by case, and show the world that these rights are real and that there are certain processes that need to be respected.
Nation-states need to learn what those rights mean, what FPIC is, that it is real, and it has to be respected and implemented. We hope that all of these cases inspire other Indigenous peoples and perhaps also provide hope that you should never give up: Always seek the next opportunity where you can take your case and seek help. We are, of course, very, very grateful for all the help and support from the international community and other Indigenous peoples in this fight, and we feel that we’re not alone.
I’ll also say another thing about these cases: These are very special because Indigenous children and youngsters are at the center of them. I think they illustrate the crux of our thinking: that these lands are not just for our generation to enjoy and deplete, but that we have to think about the next generations and their opportunities to live off these lands and continue our traditions and continue our traditional livelihoods. Maybe this is also an eye-opener that it is the Committee on the Rights of the Child that has taken a very strong stand on these issues. Our children are part of reindeer work as soon as they can walk, they come and take part in it and help and learn, and this is the way we pass on our traditions, and this is why we have preserved these lands. They learn the same principle that it’s not just for them but for the generations to come. So in this case, these are very special decisions and I admire the Sami families who were so courageous and dared to go into these processes because they’re very uncertain and take a lot of time and a lot of work. I’m very, very proud of our people for doing this.
On the other hand, it’s really heartbreaking to think that our youth have to spend so much time defending the environment and working on climate change issues, for example in the Fosen case, and in these particular decisions these are indeed children who are the complainants. We adults should be taking responsibility. But it’s amazing that our children and our young people really understand the severity of the situation that many of the adults fail to see, so we need to listen to them.
One of the decisions said that as part of the FPIC processes, governments should also listen to children and young people, and I think that’s a very promising direction because they live with the future consequences of climate change. So I’m a bit conflicted on a personal level: I think that we adults should be doing the work and carrying the responsibility, but then on the other hand, we have to listen to what our children and youngsters say because they understand everything so much better than many of us.
Q. Do you think there will be implications for companies hoping to come to Sámpi for future development projects?
A. We hope that these cases send a clear message to companies looking to develop in or conduct explorations in the Sámi homeland. Because our rights are so strong here and because they will face mobilization if they come here, hopefully they will conclude that it won’t pay off to be here. It’s quite a huge reputational risk to your company, especially if you are claiming to be sustainable and if you’re claiming to develop or support the green transition. So I think that these companies are also kind of calculating having to go to the courts and what getting these kinds of decisions from the U.N. treaty bodies would do to their brands and to their reputations.
How can you talk about sustainability if you end up violating human rights? Sustainability is an empty word if you don’t respect and implement Indigenous rights here in our homelands.
