Greenland’s High Court has determinedthat a man did not have to go to prison, even though he was convicted of violence against a municipal officer.
The High Court passed judgment in the case on 4 March. Sermitsiaq was not present in court and only later became aware of the verdict.
Greenland’s High Court has determinedthat a man did not have to go to prison, even though he was convicted of violence against a municipal officer.
The High Court passed judgment in the case on 4 March. Sermitsiaq was not present in court and only later became aware of the verdict.
The act of violence took place in a settlement on 17 July 2020. According to explanations in court, the convicted man wanted to go fishing. The municipal clerk pointed out that the man was drunk and therefore not allowed to sail anywhere.
The perpetrator grabbed the municipal officer’s collar and tore his shirt to pieces. It is an act of violence, even if the municipal officer was not physically harmed.
Victim and perpetrator know each other personally. The court still believes that the municipal officer had acted in the capacity of his office, as he intervened to prevent illegal sailing.
This means that the perpetrator could be convicted under the section of the Criminal Code on violation of public authority. And this usually means for perpetrators of violence that they will be unconditionally placed in a prison. But that’s not how it went here.
An exception to the rule
The High Court believes that because so much time has passed since the incident in 2020, the man’s measure of 60 days in prison must be made conditional. The circuit court had reached the same result when the case was heard for the first time in October 2025.
It appears from the court documents that it took over three years before the indictment was delivered to the circuit court in November 2023. After that, it took almost two years before the case came before the circuit court and thus a few more months before the case ended in the high court.
This was the second time in a short time that the high court gave a suspended sentence to a person who committed violence against law enforcement.
Something similar happened in February in a case from Nuuk, where a woman hit and bit a police officer. Here, too, the sentence was mitigated due to the processing time.
Sermitsiaq has not been able to get a comment from the Greenland Police and Prosecutor’s Office. We have previously been informed that the authorities generally do not elaborate on individual cases and why they last so long.
Sermitsiaq refrains from mentioning the exact place of the crime for the sake of the victim and his privacy. Mentioning the name of the settlement would identify the municipal officer in question.
