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RIGHTS: Native People Demand Self-Determination

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 9 2006 (IPS) - Leaders of the world’s 370 million indigenous people are calling for the United Nations General Assembly to recognise native peoples’ right to self-determination.

Their call came on Wednesday as U.N. agencies and civil society groups across the world arranged seminars and art exhibitions to mark the International Day of the Indigenous People.

The demand for the recognition of the principle of self-determination is the most significant part of the proposed U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document put together by the world body’s Permanent Forum on the Indigenous People.

Already endorsed by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Right Council, the Declaration, which was debated for more than a decade, now awaits the approval of the 191-member General Assembly, which is due to meet in New York next month.

If adopted by the General Assembly, the Declaration could be a major step toward eliminating widespread human rights violations suffered by indigenous people across the world.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s an important start,” Wilton Littlechild, a leader of the Cree Nation in Canada and a member of the forum, told a select gathering at the world body’s headquarters in New York on Wednesday.

Mindful that the Declaration is not binding to governments, Littlechild hoped that it would put some pressure on governments to observe such Universal principles as justice, democracy, respect for human rights, and equality.

The document calls for governments to respect indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and the principle of “prior, informed consent” with regard to development activities on native lands.

While a vast majority of the U.N. member states have signaled their support, a handful of countries continue to be dismissive of the Declaration. The United States, Australia and New Zealand, for example, have consistently voiced their opposition to the demand for self-determination and informed consent by arguing that it violates democratic values and individual property rights.

The U.S. and its allies are likely to put pressure for changes in the language of the proposed Declaration, but observers say such efforts may not succeed because they do not have strong support in the General Assembly. Still, the indigenous leaders are not taking it for granted.

“I call on all member states to adopt the Declaration without any changes,” said Littlechild, who has spent almost 30 years struggling to get recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights at the international level. “It’s very important to us.”

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other senior U.N. officials representing various bodies appear to be in agreement with Littlechild.

“Only by respecting cultural diversity and indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination can our work together truly be called partnership,” Annan said in a statement to mark the International Indigenous Peoples Day.

“It is a moment to acknowledge the critical challenge they face,” he added. “Much remains to be done to protect them from massive human rights violations, to alleviate the poverty they face and to safeguard against many discriminations that, for example, forces many indigenous girls to drop out of school.”

The Declaration urges the world’s developed countries to take into account the concerns of indigenous communities living within their bodies while implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a series of targets set by world leaders to make drastic cuts in poverty and fight disease, illiteracy and environmental degradation by the year 2015.

Annan acknowledged the indigenous peoples’ concerns by saying that the “perspectives, experiences and the worldviews” of the indigenous people have “a crucial role in our efforts to achieve the MDGs.”

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous People was first observed on Aug. 9, 1994, at the start of the First International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People. In December 2004, the General Assembly proclaimed the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People from 2005 to 2015.

The first objective of the Second Decade programme is meant to promote “nondiscrimination and inclusion of indigenous peoples,” according to U.N. officials.

“This objective has not been reached,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairperson of the permanent forum. “Systematic racism and discrimination is still the lot of many indigenous people not only in the developing countries, but also in the richest and most powerful countries.”

Juan Somavia, director general of the International Labor Organisation (ILO), shared her judgment by saying that research by his organisation clearly showed that indigenous people were much more vulnerable to forced labour, trafficking and employment discrimination than others.

“Their land and livelihood is under threat everywhere,” he said. “Wherever they live they are the most disadvantaged and excluded groups.”

Somavia hoped that the Declaration will complement the legal obligations associated with the ratification of states of the ILO’s indigenous and Tribal Convention of 1989.

U.N. experts on biodiversity estimate that currently the indigenous populations in the world speak about 6,000 languages, but the great majority of them, like the cultures they represent, are threatened with disappearance.

According to some scientific estimates, about 97 percent of the population speaks four percent of the languages of the world. Conversely, almost 96 percent of the languages are spoken only by three percent of the population and most of these languages are indigenous. And 10 percent have less than 100 speakers.

“These figures testify to an incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of humanity,” said Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity, who believes that the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity cannot be separated from the loss of biological diversity.