Section G: Issues: UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

On September 13, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This decision came after 25 years of United Nations meetings beginning with those convened by the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982. The Declaration is the center piece of debate between states’ governments and between states’ governments and indigenous nations. More than 5000 nations are the subject of this Declaration and its implementation is reason for the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples. The World Conference will not actually implement the Declaration. It will effectively begin the debate in earnest. Just as it took scores of meetings, negotiations and dialogue to implement provisions of the Declaration on Human Rights, it will take months and years to implement provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Considering that their are so many nations and more than 200 states, negotiations will be complicated, frustrating an sometimes successful as the years play out. Read the Declaration here and you will see why. Even though it does not contain much of the language preferred by the hundreds of indigenous peoples who traveled to Geneva every year from 1982 through 1992 to promote language for this declaration, it does contain language that has the potential for starting the dialogue and negotiations between indigenous nations and states’ governments.

In the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, we offer a sample of the type of dialogue that has already begun.