The campaign was aimed at limiting the birth rate in the Arctic territory, which had not been a Danish colony since 1953 but was still under its control.

Greenlandic, Danish and international experts have opened a probe into the legal aspects of the scandal, including violations of indigenous people’s rights and consent issues.

Its conclusions are due in mid-2025.

Another enquiry mapping the historical aspects of the campaign is to present its conclusions around the same time.

The scandal is one of many sensitive topics — including forced adoptions — souring relations between Denmark and Greenland.

The legal investigation “is a necessary step in order to move forward,” Greenland’s gender equality minister in charge of the case, Naaja Nathanielsen, told news agency AFP.

“Violations did take place. How can we frame it in a legal setting? That’s what’s being looked into right now. Maybe genocide, maybe not,” she added.

“An investigation would not be complete without looking into the human rights aspect, the indigenous rights aspect,” Nathanielsen said.

Naja Lyberth was the first woman to come forward and publicly describe how she as a young teen experienced — and here she has no doubt — that “a number of human rights were violated”.

“The right to have children, the right to build a family and the right to not be discriminated against, the right to not be subjected to experiences similar to torture,” the now 62-year-old psychologist told AFP from her seaside home in Nuuk.

Now an autonomous territory, Greenland’s colonial status ended in 1953 when it was incorporated into the Danish realm.

“We became part of Denmark, on equal footing,” Lyberth explained.

“On paper we became equals, but from my experience, that is the moment when the colonisation began, the occupation of my body, of our bodies,” Lyberth said.

‘Like a rape’

She has told her story many times now, but still fights to hold back tears as she tells it again, her loose salt-and-pepper curls framing her face.

Lyberth was around 13 or 14 when she and the other girls in her class were sent to the doctor’s office.

“His tool penetrated me to insert the coil. It was very cold and felt like a knife stabbing my insides. It was very violent,” she recalled.

“I could clearly see that the tools looked much too big for my little girl’s body, but at the time I didn’t realise they were for adult women.”

“It was like torture, like a rape,” she said.

Lyberth, who went on to have a son years later, took part in a podcast series on Danish public broadcaster DR two years ago exposing the extent of the campaign, which she herself could never have imagined.

Since then, “it’s been like living through a tsunami,” said Lyberth, whose first account of her experience in the media five years ago went largely unnoticed.

She has repeatedly urged other women to come forward, and created a private Facebook group for them, now hosting 317 members.

Like the other affected women who still live in Greenland, Lyberth — who says she is not a victim but a “survivor” — is eligible for free psychotherapy.

Trial not enough 

Nearly 150 women have sued the Danish state, and a trial could take place next year, according to their lawyer Mads Pramming.

The coils rendered around half of the women sterile, and the large majority have physical and psychological scars.

“If this case … is only treated in court, that will be a major failure,” said Nathanielsen, the Greenlandic minister.

“We need to address this in a political way, acknowledging this is a population that is affected.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has vowed that details of the scandal and Denmark’s post-colonial relations with its territories — Greenland and the Faroe Islands — will be brought to light.

“We should be three equal partners: three countries, three peoples, three languages,” she told parliament.

Frederiksen in March 2022 presented an official apology to six Greenlanders taken by force from their families as part of an experiment aimed at creating a Danish-speaking elite on the island in the 1950s.