The 11th Inuit Circumpolar Council General Assembly came to its close on Canada Day, 1 July. The general assembly, which was carried out under the slogan “Inoqatigiineq – Sharing Life”, had among its dominating themes uses of renewable and non-renewable resources, and various resistances to these uses in as well as outside of the Inuit world.

The issue of the EU ban on seal products which will come into effect in August this year created a heated discussion among Inuit leaders on the one side and their guest from the European Commission Nicholas Hanley, head of the Commission’s Unit of International Relations, on the other.

Hanley accepted a gift from his hosts consisting of a seal skin with the remark that the EU seal ban exempts products made from seals harvested by Inuit. This provoked several Inuit leaders to take the floor and condemn the ban, arguing that it will colapse the market for seal skin products regardless of provenance.

Mary Simon, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, called the exemption an “empty box” whereas outgoing ICC Chair James Stotts said that the ban was “a disrespect and disregard of Inuit culture.”

The question of legitimacy of the ban has been brought before the World Trade Organization by Canada and Inuit organizations have filed an injunction with a European court instance to have the ban blocked.

Mr. Hanley, on his side, argued that trade prohibitions similar to the EU ban has been in force in the United States for decades, therefore he did not understand why so much attention was now given to the EU ban.

Regarding the extraction of non-renewable resources - oil, gas, and uranium in particular -, opinions among the Inuit delegates differed, some emphasizing the necessity of extracting natural resources in order to secure development, others stressing the need for carrying out exhaustive environmental impact studies before deciding to start drilling.

Both views were reflected in a statement made by ICC Alaska delegate Reggie Joule to the Greenlandic radio station KNR. In that statement, Mr. Joule pointed to the Mexican Gulf oil spill as an example of how lack of public control over oil companies will lead to disasters.

Yet, he also pointed to the commercial aspect of public control: “The community must try to become co-owners in oil projects in order to get more money out of them.”

At the General Assembly, ICC announced that an emergency summit on development is going to deal with the issues of Inuit natural resources extraction. The occasion for this might be the pan-Arctic Inuit leaders’ summit, which, according to the Nuuk Declaration, ICC is to set up in 2012.