CCPR/C/83/D/1023/2001 Page 12 8.2 The authors contest the State party’s denial that it intends to carry out logging in Kippalrova and provides a map which it purports to prove otherwise. In October 2003 the National Forest and Park Service announced that it was preparing a further logging plan in Paadarskaidi. 8.3 As to the logging operations undertaken in the entire territory, the authors submit that the territory covered by the Herdsmen’s Committee is not homogeneous forest but is made up of different types of grazing land. Even though the National Forest and Park Service engages in forestry in only part of the area administered by the Committee, 35 per cent of the forest pastures in the winter grazing area and 48 percent of those in the summer grazing area are subject to forestry operations by the State and private owners. According to the current land demarcation for forestry and statements made by the National Forest and Park Service, the area in question will sooner or later be absorbed into the felling cycle. The felling cycle involves a wide range of measures, even the least invasive of which cause harm to reindeer husbandry. 9 per cent of the entire territory of the Committee is privately owned, and the owners are not subject to the same obligations as the State with respect to reindeer husbandry. 8.4 The National Forest and Park Service invited the Herdsmen’s Committee on two field trips in Kippalvaara and Kippalrova in September 2001 and Savonvaara-Pontikkamäki in January 2002, at which herdsmen expressed their opposition to the logging proposals. Nevertheless, the operations started in the Savonvaara-Pontikkamäki region (not part of the current communication) in the early spring of 2002. In October 2003, the National Forest and Park Service announced that logging will take place there in the near future. 8.5 On the issue of participation of the Herdsmen’s Committee, while the National Forest and Park Service arranged a hearing which the Committee members and other interested groups could attend, this hearing was, in practice, merely an exercise in opinion gathering. In the authors’ view, the National Forest and Park Service determines the principles, strategies and objectives of its forestry operations exclusively according to its own needs; as its decisions are not open to appeal, this fails to ensure effective participation. 8.6 As to the effects of logging, the authors refer to several investigations, studies and Committee reports which have been prepared since the previous Länsman case, and which purportedly attest to the substantial damage caused by the logging operations. An inventory of Alectoria lichen was conducted in the territory of the Lapland Herdsman’s Committee in 1999 to 2000, in which it confirmed that the incidence of Alectoria lichen in the logged forest areas is very low, and that logging operations cause considerable harm to reindeer husbandry. Similar results were found in other reports, including various Swedish studies published in 1998 and 2000. In addition, the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, in considering the maximum permissible population of reindeer per herd, acknowledged the importance and availability of winter nutrition for reindeer – Lichenes, Alectoria and Deschampsia – and that logging has reduced stocks of the former two foods. 8.7 It is submitted that after logging, as reindeer do not remain grazing on managed areas, grazing pressure comes to bear on the remaining territory. This means that the effects of logging also extend beyond the areas that are actually managed. The authors argue that the impact of logging operations are long-term, practically permanent, and that the measures employed create new damage, exacerbate existing damage, and extent the area affected by logging. Since the logging operations, the access of reindeer to winter food has become more