UN finds Finland violated political rights of indigenous Sámi people
A United Nations committee has found that Finland violated an international convention on racial discrimination when it comes to the political rights of Sámi, the EU's only indigenous people.
The case concerns interference in the 2015 Sámi Parliament elections when Finland's Supreme Administrative Court ruled that dozens of people who identified themselves as Sámi should be added to the electoral roll and therefore be eligible to vote in the elections that year.
The issue of who can call themselves Sámi is extremely sensitive among Finland's 10,000-strong Sámi community, around half of whom still live in the traditional Sámi homeland areas, called Sápmi, in Finnish Lapland.
Many Sámi people in Finland think they alone should be able to decide who is Sámi (and who is not), and that the Finnish state shouldn't have any say in the matter at all.
"Finland must respect our rights of self-determination and our customs and traditions," says Anne Nuorgam, one of the Sámi people who brought the case to the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
"It's a really important decision because it shows that the Sámi Parliament is right to say we have self-determination, and we have the possibility to determine who are part of the Sámi people and thus who are eligible to vote in the elections," Nuorgam told Euronews.
Nuorgam, who was a previous chairperson of the UN's Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said that some of the people whose names were added to the electoral roll by the Finnish court hadn't previously had any strong affiliation with Sámi identity and culture.
"We identified them as Finns," she added.
Tuesday's decision by the committee marks the third time in recent years a United Nations body has found
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