Court blocks preparatory work on Suhanko mine
Wednesday 14th October 2026 on 13:30 in
Finland
A court has barred preparatory work on the Suhanko mine project, meaning the company must wait for its environmental and water permits to become legally binding. Yle reported the ruling.
The Vaasa Administrative Court issued the interim order. The Northern Finland Regional State Administrative Agency, now called the Permit and Supervisory Agency, granted the mine and concentrator environmental and water permits in June last year. It also allowed some preparatory work to begin even if the permits were appealed.
That conditional permission included construction of a discharge pipe planned to run from Ranua to the Kemijoki River. Work on the pipe required a legally binding right-of-use decision. Tukes has granted that permit, but its decision is being appealed in the Northern Finland Administrative Court.
Nine appeals have been filed against the environmental and water permits. The municipalities of Tervola and Keminmaa, the Lapland district of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, and the group No to Lapland Mines and its partners have also asked the court to suspend enforcement. The court will rule on the appeals separately at a later date.
Suhanko Arctic Platinum Oy’s country manager, Juha Rissanen, said the interim order would not affect the company’s plans. The company had not started any work that it was permitted to carry out despite the appeals, and had already decided to wait until the permits became legally binding.
In material submitted to the court, the company said the now-prohibited work would not have begun before December 2026 at the earliest. Rissanen said the company hoped the court would decide on the appeals by December.
The Suhanko project was added last week to an EU fast-track list of strategic raw-material projects. Rissanen said the designation could allow faster processing by the administrative court, but decisions would still be made under the same laws.
The deposits are in Ranua, near the border with Tervola and 45 kilometres south of Rovaniemi. They contain palladium, platinum, copper, nickel, rhodium, cobalt and gold.