A village of Sweden’s ethnic Sami reindeer herders has won a 30-year legal battle for exclusive rights to hunting and fishing across a swathe of Arctic Sweden.
The district court in the Swedish town of Gallivare, 7 miles inside the Arctic Circle, ruled that land-use rights stripped from the tiny Sami village of Girjas in 1993 should be restored.
“It’s a great victory for the Sami population in Sweden,” said Matti Berg, the chairman of the village, The Sami are an ethnic group related to the Finns who have herded reindeer across northern Scandinavia and Russia’s Kola peninsular for thousands of years.
There are approximately 100,000 still living in the region, with about 20,000 thought to live in Sweden.
According to the UN, the Sami are the only official indigenous people in Scandinavia.