Greta Thunberg pulled from anti-wind farm protest by police
Norwegian police have briefly detained climate activist Greta Thunberg after she joined in a protest against the country’s largest onshore wind farm.
The founder of the Fridays for Future climate movement was carried away from the entrance to the finance ministry in Oslo on Tuesday, where she was protesting in solidarity with Norway’s indigenous Sami population.
Hundreds of protests have blocked the entrances to several government ministries in recent days, demanding the removal of two wind parks that cut through their herding lands.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people. Then it is not climate justice,” Ms Thunberg told Reuters on Monday.
Norway’s supreme court stripped the wind farms of their operating licences back in 2021, when the judges unanimously ruled that the turbines interfered with the Sami’s internationally protected right to a traditional way of life.
Reindeer herders from Norway’s 65,000-string Sami community had argued that the sight and sound of the 151 giant turbines scared their animals.
The turbines are part of a €1.3 billion project to erect Europe’s largest onshore wind farm.
But more than 16 months after the supreme court ruling, the wind turbines in the central Norwegian region of Fosen are still in operation.
In a furious comment piece published in the local media last month, Sami leader Silje Karine Muotka accused Oslo of placing “no value” on minority rights.
Norwegian authorities are “giving conflicting messages about why it is taking so long” to remove the turbines and “in doing so, they are violating the fundamental principles of the rule of law on minority protection,” she claimed.
Oslo has refused to commit to dismantling the wind farm, saying only that they will “make the necessary changes” to ensure that the Sami can continue to herd their reindeer in the region.
