Fact check of Rasmus Jarlov, Danish MP from Conservative Party, about ownership of Greenland.

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This is a fact checking article related to a video from Rasmus Jarlov, an MP of the Conservative Party in Denmark, who tries to explain why Denmark owns Greenland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqnI9jvnag

FACT CHECK: Denmark does not own Greenland, and Denmark has indeed subjugated natives since the arrival of Hans Egede in 1721. The cute Norse story is irrelevant: The last written record of the Norse in Greenland is from a wedding in 1408 AD. There is nothing that supports Jarlovs statement that the Norse were in Greenland until 1480 AD (or as he says until the last half of the 15th century). Denmark can not claim a legal right to the Greenlandic territory based on the presence of the Norse at that time. No matter what some kings of Denmark have imagined about "owning" Greenland, there were no Danish activity in Greenland for around 300 years. What really matters here is what happened when Greenland became a colony.

The only people present at time of the Danish colonization in 1721 AD were the ancestors to the present-day Inuit. They came as the Thule people and came to Greenland around 1200 AD. Thus we had been here for 500 years when Hans Egede arrived.

Only after 1721 does it make sense to talk about a "legal claim" of the colony(!) of Greenland, and as Jarlov says: This was done in 1814 in the Treaty of Kiel, almost 100 years after the initial colonization. Jarlov then conveniently forgets that in 1921 the Danish Parliament at the time (Rigsdagen) decided to formally include all of Greenland into the Danish Kingdom. It was necessary to do so, because older claims were not relevant. The status of Greenland was then reconfirmed in The Hague court decision from 1933 in the Norway-Denmark dispute.
So, Greenland was a Danish colony from 1721, and until 1954 recognized as such by the UN as a non-self-governing territory, dependent on a colonial Power (in this case Denmark).

Jarlov then says that the annexation of the colony of Greenland into the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953 was approved unanimously by the "Greenlandic parliament". Such a parliament did not exist at the time(!). From 1951 there was a provincial council. "The primary task of the common provincial council was to act as an adviser in relation to the Danish Government. The council had only very limited, direct responsibility for societal tasks in Greenland". This is the actual wording from the report sent to the UN to document the Self-governance Act of 2009, and therefore the official Danish version of the role of the council, and clearly such a council, led by a Danish public service state official(!), can not be attributed the competence of such decision.

The process in UN afterwards was so messy that dissertations and books have been written about it.

So what Jarlov says, that Denmark "owns" Greenland is wrong, both from a historic perspective, and in the perspective of international law, but also from a description of the events as they took place when Denmark annexed Greenland into the Kingdom of Denmark.

There is no need for Jarlov to try to twist the fact that Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland.

Who is Inuit Nutaat?

We are ordinary citizens in Kalaallit Nunaat and kalaallit in other parts of the world who share a burning desire for, and work for Greenland as an independent nation, with a population that takes responsibity for ourselves as free and independent people.

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