section_path: Culture/Human rights
section_name: Human rights
paragraph_text: Human rights
  
  Denmark is usually considered a progressive country, which has adopted legislation and policies to support women's rights, minority rights, and LGBT rights. Human rights in Denmark are protected by the state's Constitution of the Realm (Danmarks Riges Grundlov); applying equally in Denmark proper, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and through the ratification of international human rights treaties. Denmark has held a significant role in the adoption of both the European Convention on Human Rights and in the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In 1987, the Kingdom Parliament (Folketinget) established a national human rights institution, the Danish Centre of Human Rights, now the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
  
  In 2009, a referendum on changing the Danish Act of Succession were held to grant absolute primogeniture to the Danish throne, meaning that the eldest child, regardless of gender, takes precedence in the line of succession. As it was not retroactive, the current successor to the throne is the eldest son of the King, rather than his eldest child. The Danish constitution Article 2 states that "The monarchy is inherited by men and women".
  
  The Inuit have for decades been the subject of discrimination and abuse by the dominant colonisers from Europe, those countries claiming possession of Inuit lands. The Inuit have never been a single community in a single region of Inuit. From the 18th century up to the 1970s, the Danish government (Dano-Norwegian until 1814) tried to assimilate the Indigenous people of Greenland, the Greenlandic Inuit, encouraging them to adopt the majority language, culture and religion. Denmark has been greatly criticised by the Greenlandic community for the politics of Danisation (1950s and 1960s) of and discrimination against the Indigenous population of the country. Critical treatment paying non-Inuit workers higher wages than the local people, the relocation of entire families from their traditional lands into settlements, and separating children from their parents and sending them away to Denmark for schooling has been practised. Nevertheless, Denmark ratified, in 1996, to recognise the ILO-convention 169 on Indigenous people recommended by the UN.
  
  Denmark was the first country in the world to grant legal recognition to same-sex unions in the form of registered partnerships in 1989. On 7 June 2012, the law was replaced by a new same-sex marriage law, which came into effect on 15 June 2012. Greenland and the Faroe Islands legalised same-sex marriage in April 2016, and in July 2017 respectively. In January 2016, a resolution was implemented by the Danish parliament which prevented transgender identity being classified as a mental health condition. In doing so, Denmark became the first country in Europe to go against the World Health Organization (WHO) standards, which classified transgender identity as being a mental health issue until June 2018.
  
  In its 2024 Freedom in the World report, Freedom House rated the country " free " with a score of 97 (out of 100).