Equal Liberty of Access

Most people who have heard of Svalbard know it for the doomsday vault, the seed bank cut into a mountainside near Longyearbyen to keep the world's crops safe from catastrophe. Fewer know that a farmer from Chile, a programmer from Kenya or a cook from Kerala could fly up there tomorrow and stay, with no visa and no work permit, provided they could pay their own way.

That isn't a loophole. It is the price Norway agreed to pay for owning the place.

Nobody's land

For most of its history Svalbard belonged to whoever happened to be there. Denmark-Norway, England, the Dutch, Spain and France all made claims at one time or another, on the strength of discovery or whaling. By the seventeenth century the claims had petered out, and the islands became known, as the Norwegian parliament's own history puts it, as terra nullius, nobody's land. Russian trappers wintered there from 1704 until the 1850s.

Coal changed that. As long as people only hunted, trapped and did research, the arrangement worked. Once companies started mining, exclusive rights to land and seams became the whole point, and, as the Svalbard Museum puts it, the islands were "a kind of international commons, without laws and regulations, and with no courts to resolve conflicts."

The deal at Paris

After the First World War, at the peace conference, Norway proposed a solution. A commission considered it and, according to the Storting, was impressed by how Norway had handled its neutrality during the war. It agreed unanimously to recognise Norwegian sovereignty.

The treaty was signed in Paris on 9 February 1920 and came into force on 14 August 1925. Its first article gives Norway "the full and absolute sovereignty" over every island between 74 and 81 degrees north and 10 and 35 degrees east. Almost every article after that takes a piece of the sovereignty back.

The original parties were the United States, Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden, with the British Dominions signing separately. India was one of them. The Earl of Derby, Britain's ambassador in Paris, signed twice, once for the King and once, on a line of its own, for India.

What Norway gave away

Article 2 gives the ships and nationals of every party equal rights to fish and hunt. Article 3 is the one that matters most. It gives them "equal liberty of access and entry for any reason or object whatever" to the islands' waters, fjords and ports, and the right to carry on "all maritime, industrial, mining and commercial operations on a footing of absolute equality". No monopoly may be established "on any account or for any enterprise whatever".

Article 7 extends the same equality to owning property. Article 8 says the taxes Norway raises there "shall be devoted exclusively to the said territories" and no more than they need, which is why Svalbard keeps its own tax system, separate from the mainland's. It even caps the export duty on coal at 1 per cent of its value.

Then Article 9. Norway undertakes "not to create nor to allow the establishment of any naval base" and not to build any fortification "which may never be used for warlike purposes."

The country that wasn't at the table got its rights anyway. Russia, in the middle of its civil war, had no government the signatories recognised, so Article 10 simply said Russian nationals and companies would enjoy the same rights as everyone else until it could sign.

Living there without a visa

The practical result is spelled out on the website of Norway's own Governor of Svalbard. "Although Svalbard is part of Norway, the Immigration Act does not apply to the archipelago." Foreigners "do not need a visa or work and residence permits from the Norwegian authorities".

There are limits. Anyone who needs a Schengen visa still needs one to pass through mainland Norway on the way. And the Governor can turn away or expel people who cannot support themselves. "You must have the means to be able to reside on Svalbard," the page says. There is no welfare to fall back on.

It is about as close as a modern state comes to an open border, and it exists only because Norway signed one away in 1920.

The Russian town

The clearest proof of how the treaty works is Barentsburg, a Russian town on Norwegian soil. The settlement was sold to the Soviet Union in 1932, and the land still belongs to the Russian state company Trust Arktikugol. When the Barents Observer visited in 2018 it had about 450 inhabitants and dug around 140,000 tonnes of coal a year, much of it shipped to Britain, and was trying to turn itself into a destination for Russian tourists.

Norway can't expel it. Arktikugol has exactly the same right to mine as a Norwegian company does, and it uses it, partly for coal and partly, everyone assumes, for the sake of being there. The Lenin bust in the photograph above still looks out over the fjord.

Where the treaty pinches

For most of a century the arrangement was sleepy. It isn't now. The ice is retreating, the Arctic is a strategic region again, and Norway has started to test how far its sovereignty stretches against the treaty's equality.

The sharpest case came in 2024. A Norwegian-owned company, Kulspids AS, put up for sale a 60 square kilometre property at Søre Fagerfjord in the south-west of the islands, the last large piece of private land there, with an asking price reported at 300 million euros. On 1 July 2024 the government announced that any sale would need state approval under the National Security Act.

Two law professors at the University of Oslo, Geir Ulfstein and Mads Andenæs, argued that this breached Article 7's guarantee of equal rights to buy property. "It is concerning that the authorities are now disregarding the limitations on Norwegian governmental authority in Svalbard," Andenæs told the Barents Observer. The government's lawyer, the Attorney General Fredrik Sejersted, took the view that Article 7 did not apply and that the measure was "necessary and proportionate".

Both sides have a point, which is the treaty's whole difficulty. Norway is sovereign and is responsible for security on its own territory. But the treaty was written precisely so that Norwegian sovereignty would not mean Norwegian preference, and a rule that lets the state choose who may buy land sits awkwardly with "absolute equality".

Why it has held

The obvious question is why a treaty this awkward has lasted a hundred years. Part of the answer is that it gives every party something cheap to value. Nobody but Norway has to administer the place, and every signatory keeps the right to turn up. The list keeps growing. The United Arab Emirates acceded in April 2026, citing polar science.

The other part is that every party knows the alternative. Before 1920 there was no law on the islands at all, and nobody to appeal to over a disputed coal seam. The treaty replaced that with one sovereign and a long list of conditions on it, and the conditions are what made the sovereign acceptable.

In Barentsburg, Lenin is still looking out across the water at a Norwegian fjord, on land a Russian company holds under a treaty its own government never got to negotiate.

Sources

• Lovdata, "Treaty between Norway, The United States of America, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Ireland and the British overseas Dominions and Sweden concerning Spitsbergen" (the parties and signatories, including the Earl of Derby signing for India; the text of Articles 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9 and 10 as quoted).
• Stortinget, "The Svalbard Treaty" (the competing historical claims; terra nullius; Russian trappers from 1704 to the 1850s; the commission's view of Norway's wartime neutrality; signature on 9 February 1920 and entry into force on 14 August 1925; Article 9's restrictions).
• The Governor of Svalbard, "Entry and residence" (the Immigration Act not applying; no visa or work and residence permits; Schengen visas for transit through the mainland; the requirement to have the means to reside).
• Svalbard Museum, "Barentsburg" (the sale of the settlement to the Soviet Union in 1932, and the land's ownership by Trust Arktikugol).
• The Barents Observer, "Barentsburg aims to move from dirty coal to become gateway for Russia's Arctic tourism", 2018 (Barentsburg's population of about 450, annual coal output of 140,000 tonnes and shipments to Britain, and its tourism plans).
• The Barents Observer, "Legal experts: Norway's decision to block property sale contradicts the Svalbard Treaty", 2024 (Søre Fagerfjord's size and asking price; Kulspids AS; the 1 July 2024 decision under the National Security Act; the arguments of Ulfstein and Andenæs and the quotation from Andenæs; the Attorney General's position).
• Svalbard Museum, "The Svalbard Treaty" (the islands before 1920 as an international commons without laws or courts, and mining as the reason that had to change).
• The Globe and Mail, "UAE Joins Svalbard Treaty in Norway to Support Arctic Research and Cooperation", April 2026 (the UAE's accession and its stated reason of polar science).