Nuuk, Greenland, July 1st 2010

At the 11th General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Mr. Aqqaluk Lynge, Greenland, was elected Chair of ICC.

Aqqaluk Lynge has represented the Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the Far East of Russia as President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) from 1997 to 2006. At the ICC's 10th General Assembly in Barrow, Alaska, July 2006, Mr. Lynge was re-appointed President of ICC Greenland and ICC Vice-Chair. Mr. Lynge started his professional career as a social worker after graduating from the National Danish School of Social Work in 1976. For several years, he was a radio broadcaster until he entered Greenland politics. He has promoted the rights of Indigenous Peoples both in his home country of Greenland and globally since his youth. He has also demonstrated a deep commitment to pan-Inuit unity since the early 1970s and, before becoming ICC President in 1997, he served as a continuous member of the ICC Executive Council since 1980.

Mr. Lynge was first elected to the Greenland Parliament in 1983 and has served both as a Member of Parliament and as a Minister of various portfolios. Mr. Lynge is widely published, having written books of poetry, essays and politics. He has also contributed to several works and anthologies written in the English, Greenlandic, French and Nordic languages.

Mr. Lynge was instrumental in bringing Russian Inuit into the ICC family when, as early as 1985, he travelled to Moscow in the former Soviet Union to lobby for their inclusion into ICC. In 1988, he also visited Chukotka in the Soviet far Northeast where most of Russias Inuit live. He has been an invited speaker at a wide range of international human rights fora, at wildlife management conferences, environmental summits, Arctic Council Ministers summits and others. Most recently, he has been a very active supporter of the Thule Case, which dealt with the 1953 forced relocation of Greenlandic Inuit to make way for the US military base in northern Greenland.

Mr. Lynge resides in Nuuk, Greenland with his wife Erna and their two children.