The mining legislation currently in force in Finland is based on a claim system where, regardless of the ownership of the property, the right to exploit a deposit containing mining minerals belongs to the party who found the deposit.

The key aim of the claim system is to promote the position of those who find mining minerals regardless of the ownership of properties and create incentives to exploration and mining operations.

In the report, the law firm Hannes Snellman assesses the role of the regulation of reservations in the Mining Act (621/2011) currently in force for exploration and the mining sector. The report also assesses the impact of the regulation of reservations on the rights of landowners, local economic activities and land use in the area, and the realisation of the rights of the Sámi people in the Sámi homeland, and the impacts of the reservation mechanism concerning the reservation rights, social aspects and the environment. Feedback from stakeholders was collected for the report. In addition, the report discusses various options to develop the regulation of reservation in the Mining Act, or to abolish the reservation mechanism altogether.

From the perspective of exploration and mining operations, the reservation notification under the Mining Act has been considered an appropriate procedure for clarifying the order of priority between operators engaged in exploration before the actual exploration permit phase. The entry of the priority included in the reservation mechanism into the register kept by the mining authority is also important when the parties engaged in exploration apply for funding for the prospecting work. From the perspective of landowners, business operators and other stakeholders in the area concerned in the reservation, the reservation mechanism in the Mining Act is considered to cause uncertainty with respect to the future use and management of areas concerned in the reservation. If the aim is to develop the reservation mechanism by retaining the reservation as a separate notification procedure, possible ways to amend the Mining Act could be the specification of the surface area to be covered by the reservations, duration of the reservations, and scope of the rights concerning participation and administrative or judicial reviews. If the option of abolishing the reservation mechanism altogether from the regulation of reservations is considered but the aim is to retain the elements of the mechanism that encourage exploration, this could be done by including the reservation mechanism in the exploration permit procedure under the Mining Act.