VICE CHAIRPERSON

SWEDEN

 Lars is a Saami and reindeer herder from Sweden. He served as the president of the Saami Parliament in Sweden in 2001 and chairperson of the Union of the Swedish Saami (Svenska Samernas Riksforund, SSR) from 1993 to 2001.

As a member of the Saami Council, Lars-Anders was involved in the pan-Saami movement in the early 1970s and served as the chairperson of the council when the Saami population in Russia was integrated into the pan-Saami movement during the glasnost period at the end of the 1980s.

As a key figure in the Saami Council, he was also involved in setting up the development aid program which is an indigenous to indigenous program in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and in the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations from 1983 onwards.

He was also involved as NGO representative and expert in government delegation when the International Labor Organization revised Convention No. 107 and replaced it with the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169) between 1987 and 1989. Likewise, he was engaged in indigenous-related matters in the UN system such as World Intellectual Property Organization and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He was a research fellow at the Nordic Sámi Institute, Kautokeino, Norway and a visiting researcher at the University of Finnish Lapland in Rovanemi, Finland.