INARI, Finland — Finland’s Parliament on Wednesday approved a revised Sami Parliament Act by a vote of 112 to 61, ending more than a decade of attempts to settle who may vote for the indigenous people’s representative body and answering a series of rebukes from United Nations human rights committees.
The law replaces a definition that had allowed descendants of people recorded as Lapps in 18th- and 19th-century tax registers to claim voting rights with one based on language: a person qualifies if they, a parent, or a grandparent learned a Sami language as their first language. The change is expected to remove several hundred people from the electoral roll of roughly 6,000 and to exclude a number of families in the Inari region who regard themselves as Sami but cannot meet the language test.
“This is not about blood, and it has never been,” said Anni-Sofia Länsman, the president of the Sami Parliament, who spoke in Inari after the vote. “It is about whether a people have the right to say who belongs to them. Today Finland said yes. It took long enough.”
The U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled in 2019 that Finland had violated the Sami people’s right to self-determination by allowing its Supreme Administrative Court to add voters over the Sami Parliament’s objections. Three previous governments drafted bills to fix the problem; all three collapsed under pressure from lawmakers in Lapland, where the issue has divided villages and, in some cases, families.
Mikko Kemppainen, a member of the Inari municipal council, is among those who will lose the right to vote. His great-grandmother, he said, was a Sami speaker who was punished for using the language at a boarding school in the 1920s and never taught it to her children. “The state took the language from my family,” he said. “Now the state says that because we do not have it, we are not who we say we are. I understand the Sami Parliament’s fear of being outvoted by outsiders. I am not an outsider.”
Sanna Virtanen, who drafted the bill at the Justice Ministry, said the government had considered a wider definition but concluded it would not survive international scrutiny. “Every indigenous rights body that has looked at this has said the same thing,” she said. “The group defines itself. We could keep arguing with them or we could legislate.”
The law also strengthens the Sami Parliament’s right to be consulted on land use, mining, and reindeer herding across the Sami homeland, an area of 35,000 square kilometers in Finland’s far north where tourism and a proposed rare-earth mine have raised tensions. It takes effect in January, in time for the Sami Parliament’s next election, in 2027. Ms. Länsman said her first act would be to visit Inari’s villages. “Some of the people who lost a vote today are my neighbors,” she said. “I owe them a conversation.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 4 of the European edition with the headline: After a Decade of Failed Attempts, Finland Passes a New Law on Who Counts as Sami.
