Sweden's indigenous Sami people win rights battle against state

Court grants Arctic village rights over hunting and fishing after lawyers for state were accused of ‘rhetoric of race biology’

Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden. Photograph: Alamy

Sami people in northern Sweden. Photograph: Alamy

David Crouch in Gothenburg-Wednesday 3 February 2016

Sweden’s nomadic reindeer herders have won a 30-year battle for land rights in a court case that has seen the state accused of racism towards the country’s only indigenous people.

A decision in Gällivare district court on Wednesday granted the tiny Sami village of Girjas, inside the Arctic Circle, exclusive rights to control hunting and fishing in the area, restoring powers stripped from the Sami people, or Laplanders, by Sweden’s parliament in 1993.

“It is a symbolic step towards getting Sami rights acknowledged, and we hope that this verdict can shape policies towards Sami issues in Sweden, that was the main goal,” said Åsa Larsson Blind, vice-president of the Sami Council, which represents Sami people in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.

After a long struggle during which the Swedish Sami Association petitioned the European commission and the court of human rights, the case came to court in Sweden last year.

Lawyers for the state claimed that the indigenous status of the Samis was irrelevant to the case. “Sweden has in this matter no international obligations to recognise special rights of the Sami people, whether they are indigenous or not,” they said.

In an open letter, 59 academic researchers, including ethnographers and anthropologists at the Sami Research Centre at Umeå University, condemned the lawyers for using the “rhetoric of race biology” and revealing “a surprising ignorance of historical conditions”.

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