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RIGHTS: Expectations and Numbers Grow for U.N. Indigenous Forum

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, May 12 2003 (IPS) - If attendance is a gauge of expectations, the world’s aboriginal people will be demanding much of the second session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues when it opens in New York on Monday.

If attendance is a gauge of expectations, the world’s aboriginal people will be demanding much of the second session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues when it opens in New York on Monday.

Registration for the meeting was at 1,500 last week, about double the numbers at last year’s inaugural assembly of the body set up to advise the U.N. system on improving the lives of the planet’s more than 300 million indigenous people.

Topping the agenda will be the welfare of indigenous children, and the two-week meeting will also discuss economic and social development, the environment, health, human rights, culture and education. But underlying most of those issues is the question of indigenous people’s control over land and resources.

The presence of the U.N. human rights investigator on indigenous peoples issues and a World Bank representative will help to spotlight the role of land rights, say participants. The Bank is now revising its policies on indigenous peoples.

”Potentially (it’s) very significant if the international financial institutions (IFIs) use this forum as an opportunity to express a commitment to deal (with indigenous people) within the international human rights framework. That could really change the way the IFIs relate to indigenous peoples,” says Marcus Colchester, director of Forest Peoples Programme, a Britain-based support group.

Forum member Wayne Lord stresses that the body does not have powers to create legally-binding standards but adds, ”Clearly all the members of the Permanent Forum are well aware that at the back of many of these issuesàis this issue of indigenous peoples and their relationship to land”.

”You have to talk about these issues,” says Lord, from Canada, one of eight government-appointed members of the Forum. Eight others were chosen by their peers, and all of them for three-year terms. ”When we provide advice and recommendations to the U.N. system, who’s to say we couldn’t recommend that one of the answers is to work on access to land and resources?” he adds.

Many aboriginal people say that access should have already been guaranteed in a declaration on the rights of indigenous people, a document that has been in the draft stage for more than a decade, while governments – including Canada, the United States and Australia, say advocates – erect roadblocks toward its implementation.

One group worries that the road that leads to the declaration could be closed forever. The International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People ends in 2004 and it is possible that opponents of the declaration could suggest that if the draft is not completed by then, the process must end, says the U.S.-based International Indian Treaty Council (IITC).

”The Permanent Forum itself should make appropriate recommendations to the Commission (on Human Rights) as to extensions of time and methods of work regarding the declaration, that it not be lost or compromised,” the Council says in a letter to the Forum.

”We further urge the Permanent Forum to recommend to the Commission and its working group on the draft declaration that any standard that it adopts not be lower than those already recognised by international law and the internationally recognised legal framework,” it adds.

Lord says the task of the group drafting the declaration is ”patently obvious” and that the Forum will refrain from telling it how to do its job. But it is conceivable that the body would ”encourage the working group – ‘get on with your job’,” he adds.

Likewise, the New-York based Forum could press for action on possible human rights violations, says Lord.

”I could conceive of a situation where an indigenous people’s group comes to the Permanent Forum and says ‘look, we’ve got a really bad situation here, what can you do about it’? One of the things we might be able to do is say, ‘we think we would like to recommend that the special rapporteur (on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people) look into given situations’.”

The special rapporteur, a position created in 2001, visited the Philippines in December, looking specifically at the impacts of large-scale development projects on the human rights of indigenous peoples and on the administration of justice, according to the Tebtebba Foundation, a Philippines-based group that advocates for native rights.

”We recommend that (the special rapporteur’s) reports on the Philippine and Guatemalan missions be studied seriously by the Forum,” says the group in a letter on the Forum website. ”His reports can be used to inform future processes and debates centreing around the issue of development, human rights and indigenous peoples.”

”A common observation made is that more rights are offered to transnational corporations than to indigenous peoples,” Tebtebba adds. ”The relationship between globalisation and the policies and programmes of international financial institutions, and the worsening impoverishment of indigenous peoples, should be a subject of further research.”

At the end of last year’s meeting, the Forum recommended, among other things: publication every three years of a report titled ‘State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples’; a study to determine which indigenous people do not have access to health care, and a working group on how aboriginals are affected by exploitation of resources, such as the use of plants for medical purposes.

All its proposals were approved by the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) along with the creation of a secretariat to carry out Forum business between annual meetings.

After being born in an ”off” year for U.N. funding, the body will also be included in the next round of biannual allocations, says Lord, ”and what we’re asking for – let’s say a million-and-a-half (dollars), in the overall U.N. budget isn’t huge”.

The Forum’s 15 other members represent all of the world’s regions.