CCPR/C/124/D/2668/2015 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was submitted on behalf of the members of the Sami Council and 23 persons, two of whom are members of the Sami Parliament. 4.3 Section 14 of the Act on the Sami Parliament provides that the Sami Parliament is to appoint an Election Committee. Section 26 (as amended in 2002) stipulates that individuals who believe they have been unlawfully omitted from the electoral roll can request the Election Committee to rectify the matter urgently. This decision can be appealed to the Board of the Sami Parliament. Pursuant to section 26b (as amended in 2002), Board decisions can be appealed to the Supreme Administrative Court within 14 days of the date when the person concerned received notice of the decision. The Court supervises the lawfulness and uniformity of the decisions taken. 4.4 A recent report of the Prime Minister’s Office 6 indicates that the Supreme Administrative Court decisions of 2011 and 2015 applied the recommendations issued by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in its concluding observations regarding the ninth, tenth and seventeenth to nineteenth periodic reports of Finland to better take into account an individual’s self-identification within the Sami definition. 7 4.5 The Act on the Sami Parliament addresses the obligation of public authorities to negotiate with the Sami Parliament in its section 9, which states: (1) The authorities shall negotiate with the Sámi Parliament in all far-reaching and important measures which may directly and in a specific way affect the status of the Sámi as an indigenous people and which concern the following matters in the Sámi homeland: (1) community planning; (2) the management, use, leasing and assignment of state lands, conservation areas and wilderness areas; (3) applications for licences to stake mineral mine claims or file mining patents; (4) legislative or administrative changes to the occupations belonging to the Sámi form of culture; (5) the development of the teaching of and in the Sámi language in schools, as well as the social and health services; or (6) any other matters affecting the Sámi language and culture or the status of the Sámi as an indigenous people. (2) In order to fulfil its obligation to negotiate, the relevant authority shall provide the Sámi Parliament with the opportunity to be heard and discuss matters. Failure to use this opportunity in no way prevents the authority from proceeding in the matter. 4.6 On 8 November 2017, the Ministry of Justice appointed a committee to draft a number of amendments to the Act on the Sami Parliament. The mandate of its work was derived from the fundamental rights and other obligations imposed by the Constitution of Finland, international human rights treaties binding on Finland and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The committee also took into account the initialled Nordic Sami Convention and the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. The proposed amendments include modifications to the right to vote in elections to the Sami Parliament. The relevant provision as modified would, like the criteria currently in force, require both subjective consent and the fulfilment of certain objective criteria: that the person, or at least one of his or her parents, grandparents or great-grandparents, has learned Sami as his or her first language or that at least one of the parents has been included 6 7 6 The State party refers to Leena Heinämäki and others, Actualizing Sámi Rights: International Comparative Research, publications of the Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities (Prime Minister’s Office, 2017). A/45/18, para. 91, CERD/C/63/CO/5, para. 11, and CERD/C/FIN/CO/19, para. 13. GE.19-04714