This chapter focuses on how the Finnish 1935 and 1950 sterilisation and castration acts were established, implemented and abolished. It also describes the formation of an infertility requirement in the 2002 law which still regulates legal gender recognition for trans people today. The chapter also recounts how some victims, mainly trans people and organisations, are continuously mobilising to eliminate the requirement and restructure the law. It compares the mobilisation and non-mobilisation of the groups and the persisting refusal of the Finnish state to acknowledge the violations, accept state responsibility for them, and provide related remedies for the victims. In terms of grievance formation, the chapter outlines a stalled process. Therefore, victims have generally refrained from mobilisation due to a missing common identity and sense of wrong to be remedied. The chapter signals a prevailing absence of a socio-cultural rights frame recognising harms of victims and public responsibility in Finland. In this sense, the lack of remedial culture is more evident and the structural impediments to grievance formation are higher in Finland than in its Nordic neighbours.

In the last century, the treatment of victims of involuntary sterilisation and castration in Nordic countries has varied drastically from state to state, across time and victim groups. Considering why this is the case, Daniela Alaattinoğlu investigates how laws and practices of involuntary, surgical sterilisation and castration have been established, abolished and remedied in three Nordic states: Sweden, Norway and Finland. Employing a vast range of primary and secondary sources, Alaattinoğlu traces the national and international developments of the last 100 years. Developing the concept of grievance formation, the book explores why some states have claimed public responsibility while others have not, and why some victim groups have mobilised while others have remained silent. Through this pioneering analysis, Alaattinoğlu illuminates issues of human and constitutional rights, the evolution of the welfare state and state responsibility in both national and global contexts.

This chapter analyses the Swedish sterilisation laws of 1934 and 1941, castration law of 1944 and sterilisation precondition in the gender recognition act of 1972. More specifically, it considers their establishment, abolition and partial remedy. Exploring both written sources and interviews, the chapter uncovers the processes leading to the compensation acts of 1999 and 2018, and how (particularly trans) victims have mobilised for, and accessed, remedies. The chapter discloses an underlying tension between the limited legal admission of responsibility and the remedies established as ex gratia compensation schemes. It compares the unequal remedies given to each different victim group against their diverging degree of mobilisation. In order to understand their dissimilar recognition and redress, the chapter analyses how grievances have formed and been individually, collectively, publicly and/or institutionally recognised for the different groups. In doing so, it illustrates how the victims’ claims have aligned with a master frame of rights and achieved legal and socio-cultural resonance to diverging degrees