Iceland should have 'skin in the game' in securing Arctic, PM says

Euronews

5 days ago

Iceland needs to have "skin in the game" when it comes to defence and security in the High North and is looking at how to adjust its defence posture and spending accordingly, the country's prime minister said on Wednesday.
"When it comes to the Arctic, this is a place where we have to step up. This is our area. We need to have skin in the game when it comes to the Arctic and have an opinion on that, not that just being run by others," Kristrún Frostadóttir said in Brussels following a meeting with NATO chief Mark Rutte.
"I see a lot of possibilities coming out of that as well, even though we're in a situation where this is also run a bit from a threat position, there's still possibilities for build-up in Iceland as well. So this is something we're looking into. We will have concrete points going into the Hague summit and then also going forward in our spending reviews," she added, referring to a NATO summit scheduled to take place in the Dutch city in late June.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force, arguing that US control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory is necessary for "international security".
"We have a lot of our favourite players cruising around the coast and we have to be careful," Trump told Rutte in March.
"The whole area is becoming very important and for a lot of reasons, the routes are very direct to Asia, to Russia, and you have ships all over the place and you have to have protection. So we're going to have to have a deal on that," he added.
Russia and China have increased their presence on the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a shipping lane in the Arctic Ocean that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This is due to warming temperatures, which makes the route more manageable for longer, and Chinese growing appetite for Russian commodities including fossil fuels.
Rosatom, a Russian state corporation primarily focusing on energy and high-tech products, said last month that the volume of cargo transportation along the NSR reached a record high of 37.9 million tonnes, a 4.4% increase on the previous year and a near ten-fold increase from ten years ago.
China, which describes itself as a "near-Arctic state", and Russia are also increasing their military presence in the natural resources-rich area, with joint patrols and military exercises.
Denmark, an EU and NATO member state, announced shortly after Trump's return to the White House that it will inject €1.95 billion into boosting its military presence in the Arctic and North Atlantic region.
Iceland, together with Norway and UK, two fellow NATO allies, is also now using AI to detect hostile activity in the Arctic.
Frostadóttir stressed on Wednesday that although the island nation doesn't have a military, "that doesn't mean we don't have strong defences and a role to play in NATO".
Members of the military alliance are currently negotiating an increase to its defence spending target from its current 2% of GDP threshold. Allies appear to have landed on 5% of GDP target, a number repeatedly called for by Trump, although it would be split in two: 3.5% of GDP for hard military spending, and a further 1.5% on defence-related spending including, for instance, infrastructure and cybersecurity.
NATO defence ministers will continue negotiations next week at a meeting in Brussels, with leaders set to adopt the new target at the June summit in The Hague.
"We're willing to spend more when it comes to defence-related investments, to strengthen our facilities when it comes to Keflavik Air Base, when it comes to ports, when it comes to general host nation support," Frostadóttir said.
"And also very good and constructive talks on Arctic security. We're aware of our position in the north. This is obviously our home. It's not just a conceptualised idea."
"Russia's aggression towards Ukraine is something that is relevant to us, even though it's far away, because if they win on the eastern flank, they might move their views towards the north, which is where we live. So this is also our fight," she added.
Rutte, speaking alongside Frostadóttir on Wednesday, said positive steps have been taken by the seven allies that have stakes in the Arctic - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the US - but that the alliance as a whole needs to be better organised, including when it comes to intelligence gathering.
"We do not have enough icebreaker capacity within NATO potentially, so we have to look into that," he also said.
Former surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec was handed a 20-year sentence on Wednesday, after being found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting 299 children, over a 25-year period which spanned from 1989 to 2014.
Judges followed the public prosecutor's recommendations, sentencing Le Scouarnec to France's maximum jail term for aggravated rape after a three-month trial.
Most of Le Scouarnec's victims were unconscious or sedated hospital patients when the crimes occurred. The 74 year old's victim include 158 boys and 141 girls, aged on average 11 years at the time of the crimes.
The criminal court of Morbihan in Brittany, ordered the former surgeon serve at least two-thirds of his sentence, before being eligible for release on parole.
Le Scouarnec is already serving a 15-year prison sentence for a conviction he was handed in 2020 for the rape and sexual assault of four children, including two nieces.
In French law, sentences run concurrently and Le Scouarnec should only serve the additional years after the first sentence is completed.
Despite handing Le Scouarnec the maximum sentence, the court rejected a request from prosecutors calling for the application of a specific provision of French criminal law, which is designed to ensure that criminals who have served their sentence but are likely to reoffend be placed in supervised centres upon their release.
However, the court rejected this request, citing Le Scouarnec's "desire to make amends."
For many of Le Scouarnec's victims and their lawyers this decision was a major blow.
"Psychiatric assessments of Le Scouarnec raised concerns regarding the risk he could repeat similar crimes, so I am baffled by this decision", Gwendoline Tenier, a lawyer who represented one of the former surgeon's victims told Euronews.
Le Scouarnec was first convicted in 2005 for possession of child pornography and was handed a four-month suspended prison sentence and a €90 fine.
At the time, no measures were taken to suspend his medical license or limit his contact with children, and Le Scouarnec continued his abuse in hospitals until his arrest in 2017.
A number of Le Scouarnec's victims and their lawyers have complained about a perceived lack of attention from the media over the course of the trial.
"Media coverage of the trial has been extremely disappointing and has fallen short of showing the level of the violent crimes which were carried out", Maëlle Noir, an activist for the feminist NGO Nous Toutes told Euronews.
"We can't help but compare the media coverage for this case with the trial of Dominique Pelicot, in which Gisèle's was portrayed as a sort of iconic figure. This could not happen in this trial because of the sheer amount of victims", added Noir.
For others, the media is to blame, but also the public's inability to process the nature of the crimes.
"Such sordid, repulsive acts committed against children go beyond the intellectual and processing abilities of many individuals. This is very problematic as it causes many people to turn away from these issues", Tenier told Euronews.
Tenier's client was summoned in 2019 by police investigators for a hearing which would change her life.
"She discovered that Le Scouarnec had raped her when she was 11, while being treated for appendicitis in hospital," said Tenier.
The alleged incident happened in 2001 in a hospital in Brittany where Annabelle's mother worked as a care assistant and Le Scouarnec had been practising for years.
According to several victims and human rights NGOs, France's health and judicial authorities are also partly to blame for the scale of the abuse Le Scouarnec was able to carry out.
In mid-May, a group of 50 victims sent a letter to France's Ministries of Health and Justice, as well as to the country's High Commissioner for Children, in which they called on the authorities to establish an inter-ministerial commission following the trial.
Meanwhile, the child protection charity "La Voix De l'Enfant" has condemned the lack of investigations into Le Scouarnec from health authorities or other related bodies, despite the fact he was handed a four-month suspended prison sentence in 2005 for possessing images of child pornography.
The trial is the culmination of a seven-year investigation, which began when a six-year-old neighbour told her parents that Le Scouarnec had touched her over the fence which separated their properties.
Police searched Le Scouarnec's home and discovering his diaries in which he is alleged to have meticulously catalogued the instances of rape and abuse, alongside the victims' names.
In one entry, he allegedly wrote: "I am a paedophile and I always will be."
Not all victims were initially aware they had been abused. Some were contacted by investigators after their names appeared in journals kept by Le Scouarnec, in which he meticulously documented his crimes.
Others only realised they had been hospitalised at the time after checking medical records. Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial.
Using the cover of medical procedures, the former surgeon took advantage of moments when children were alone in their hospital rooms.
His method was to disguise sexual abuse as clinical care, targeting young patients who were unlikely to remember the encounters.
Le Scouarnec's trial comes as campaigners across France have been attempting to lift the taboo which has long surrounded sexual abuse, months after the Gisèle Pelicot case drew to a close.
Pelicot was drugged and raped by her ex-husband and dozens of other men over a nine-year period. The men involved were handed sentences ranging from three to 20 years.
In a separate case focusing on alleged abuse at a Catholic school, an inquiry commission of the National Assembly, France's lower house of parliament, is investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse over five decades.