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.

This chapter introduces the central research agenda, methodology, and scope of the book, centring the concept of grievance formation. Discussing the legal foundations and modalities of remedies in international law, the chapter poses the question of state remedial responsibilities in relation to the passage of time. This is a central question in the globally emerging discussions on whether states ought to remedy sterilisation or castration practices in their past. Furthermore, the chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the book’s use of the concept of grievance formation. As employed in social movement theory, this concept describes the process of people starting to address harmful experiences as common grievances. In this chapter, the concept is initially introduced into legal research by linking it with rights mobilisation: how victims of rights violations redefine traumatic experiences as individual or common grievances, rights violations, and legal harm to be remedied. As such, the concept offers a theoretical framework to understand how and why some victims of rights violations begin to conceptualise themselves as such and demand state responsibility, while others might not; why victims are publicly and institutionally recognised and redressed to different extents.

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 shows how involuntary sterilisation and castration have become problematised in international law. The chapter discusses the rise of international law and human rights in the post-war context. Despite being regarded as international crimes on meeting certain criteria since the Nuremberg trials, the interventions are rarely prosecuted in practice. Efforts to mainstream involuntary sterilisation as human rights violations have been more successful. This development began in the 1990s and has since gone from soft law to binding legal obligations. The chapter shows that uncertainty prevails regarding the legal and remedial conceptualisation of involuntary sterilisation and castration in international human rights law due to inconsistent and incidental treatment of such cases. Ultimately, the argument is made that international law provides a socio-legal master frame for national legal claims. In the case of involuntary sterilisation and castration, however, this master frame is not sharply defined, effectively impeding investigation and problematisation of the practices in national contexts.

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 concludes by offering some brief reflections regarding the utility of grievance formation as a theoretical and methodological tool in socio-legal research in order to understand rights developments in context.

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

The prologue explains the meaning of involuntary sterilisation and castration and traces the origins of the practices back to the rise of the eugenics movement. It provides an overview of how involuntary sterilisation and castration have intersectionally targeted marginalised groups in different countries and sketches out how these laws and practices globally have prioritised assumed public interests over individual ones. Doing so, the prologue follows how medico-legal experts and public authorities have defined healthy and unhealthy bodies and behaviours throughout the twentieth century.