Forced sterilisation, Indigenous peoples’ rights, consent legislation and the legal parenthood rights of trans individuals. Researcher and lawyer Daniela Alaattinoğlu from Finland does not shy away from contentious debate. It has also earned her the Nils Klim Prize.
Kilden’s news magazine met Alaattinoğlu in Bergen, where she was awarded the prize in June.
“What draws you to these issues?”
“I'm very interested in how society and the legal system evolve,” Daniela Alaattinoğlu tells Kilden.
How do law and justice evolve in step with the changes in society? The question is a recurring theme in Alaattinoğlu’s research. In recent years, Nordic courtrooms – and society at large – have seen major shifts around gender, sexual offences and reproductive rights.
“Often it’s like ‘Whoa! What’s going on here’,” she says.
And Alaattinoğlu has jumped on it.
In her current research projects, she has turned her attention to the truth and reconciliation commissions that are currently or have recently completed their work in the various Nordic countries. Many interesting questions about the state’s responsibility emerge in the wake of their work, such as:
“How should this oppression be redressed?”
Strategic litigation
Between 1972 and 2012, people were required to undergo sterilisation to legally change their gender in Sweden. In 2012, this requirement was challenged through protests, petitions – and legal actions. In 2012, the Court of Appeal in Stockholm ruled that the sterilisation requirement was discriminatory and in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The requirement was repealed the following year.
“In many countries, transgender parenting is treated as unthinkable because it doesn’t fit into rigid categories and traditional ideas of man, woman, father and mother”, she explains.
Norway had a similar policy until 2016.
In 2013, supported by civil organisations, two Swedish trans men took legal action against the Swedish state because they were registered as mothers. The court ruled in their favour. The cases led to amendments to the Children and Parents Code in 2018.
These are examples of strategic legal action: Individuals and/or organisations bringing legal action with the aim of achieving legal reform.
At the margins of the law
The Nils Klim Prize jury highlights Alaattinoğlu’s work on forced sterilisation in the Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden and Finland, over the past hundred years. Countries that have seen major changes in recent years.
These countries also see themselves as champions of human rights. A rather selective self-image, according to her.
Alaattinoğlu believes that the countries' history in relation to minority groups such as the Roma, Romani, the poor, people with disabilities and trans people shows otherwise.
“My project aimed to show that it’s not that simple.”
“The method has been to focus on groups that have been seen as ‘legally peripheral’: indigenous peoples and sexual minorities, for example.”
“Indigenous or gender issues are often regarded as relating to niche groups in court,” she explains. “It tends to be more difficult for them to exercise fundamental rights, such as property rights and freedom of speech, within the national legal culture.”
But the different forms of oppression also tend to be isolated from each other.
“Especially in the Norwegian context, it has been argued that historical sterilisations are not comparable to contemporary practice.”
In Norway, between 1934 and 1978, ‘vagrant women’ could be subjected to forced sterilisation. Norgeshistorie.no writes that ‘especially from the end of the 1930s until the end of the 1940s, “vagrant women” had a higher risk of forced sterilisation than other women’. This could be because they belonged to a certain ethnic group, and Romani women were at particular risk, or related to class affiliation or disability. The law allowed forced sterilisation of ‘insane persons and persons with particularly poorly developed mental abilities’.
In Sweden, sterilisation requirements and the use of force have, to a greater extent, been considered in a cross-group context, according to Alaattinoğlu.
Different understanding of force
In both countries, trans people have also sought compensation after the sterilisation requirement was abolished. One of the most important questions here has been what is force and what is not.
“The law, both in Sweden and Norway, has forced trans people to choose between being able to change their legal gender and becoming parents.”
“Which in many ways is blatantly absurd.”
In Sweden, the plaintiffs were awarded compensation. Not so in Norway, where a more narrow interpretation of force was applied.
“The rise of human rights is, in many ways, a counter movement against an instrumental view of people, that people cannot merely be used as means to an end.”
A society's view of its citizens
In 2025, declining birth rates have been high on the political agenda across borders. From the United States to Finland and Norway, politicians, advisors and committees are debating how to encourage citizens to have more children.
The view of the population as something that can be counted, managed and controlled emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state at the end of the 19th century, Alaattinoğlu tells Kilden. The conclusion in several countries was that they wanted fewer people who incur costs: poor people or people with disabilities, or people thought to be ‘feeble-minded’.
“The rise of human rights is, in many ways, a counter movement against an instrumental view of people, that people cannot merely be used as means to an end.”
In the debate on declining fertility and demographics, or at least parts thereof, Alaattinoğlu believes that such instrumental thinking seems to be making a comeback.
“For example that we want certain types of migrants who bring economic value to society,” she says.
“Many far-right and radical right-wing movements talk quite explicitly about wanting more white children. And that the majority population is threatened by minorities, about wanting fewer, well … non-whites.”
“And although this has not been expressed by most politicians, the question is often made to be about why the white middle class is not having more children,” she says.
“The idea that the population is something that can be shaped by the state can be dangerous. We should have learnt from history.”
“How then do you think we should approach the issue of declining birth rates and an ageing population?”
“This is slightly outside the scope of what I normally work with, but I think you have to consider questions such as: what does a just society really mean?”
Moving towards consent laws in all the Nordic countries
One of the key issues in the wake of feminist mobilisation and the #MeToo movement has been the introduction of consent legislation.
This victory is shared by activists in Sweden, Finland and Norway. A consent law that can be roughly summarised as a ‘yes means yes’ model was passed by the Storting this spring.
However, academics and experts are divided regarding the introduction of this model.
“There is a tendency in social movements to attach too much importance to law and justice,” says Alaattinoğlu, referring to the English feminist and sociologist Carol Smart.
"But this is just the start,” she adds, "I think a yes means yes model is the most comprehensive and best wording of such a law.”
A researcher's role, however, is to be critical and follow up how the law works in practice, she adds.
“An advantage of such a consent law is that it is intuitive and easily understood by all parties. An objection is that it is not the Penal Code’s task to educate”
“Yes, and that is an important principle, that criminal law should not be used to impose symbolic changes,” she says.
“At the same time, there must be alignment between the law, legal interpretations and the prevailing attitudes in society. In both Sweden and Finland, there was a lot of talk about consent and voluntariness even before the law was introduced. Even in the courts.”
This is also the case in Norway, where many activists and politicians have been calling for a consent law for years.
“I don't think there is a perfect term for it. But consent puts the spotlight on whether all parties are taking part willingly, and how consent is secured. In practice, it may not always be about the perpetrator having a mistaken perception of the victim’s willingness, but rather about failing to properly check it.”
The article was first published in Norwegian, and then translated to English by Totaltekst.
