On Fragile Architecture: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Context of Human Rights

Human rights, Indigenous peoples and the concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent

“…Between 2009 and 2010, the four opposing countries changed their position and are now signatories to the Declaration, along with two of the abstaining countries, Colombia and Samoa. Nevertheless, at their respective announcements of endorsement, Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand all emphasized that they did not consider UNDRIP to be a legally binding document, but rather an aspirational goal (Engle 2011;Wiessner 2011).…”

“…Many countries were reluctant to recognize the collective right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination because they feared it could threaten state sovereignty and lead to an escalation in claims for independence by Indigenous peoples (Engle 2011). A complicating factor is that there is a difference between internal and external self-determination.…”

“…This leads us to the question of cultural rights, which also became an important claim and one of the major strategies of Indigenous rights advocates since the 1990s (Engle 2011). Cultural rights, that is, the right of a particular ethnic group to maintain its own culture, are broad.…”

Adapting Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) to Local Contexts in REDD+: Lessons from Three Experiments in Vietnam

“…FPIC is a politically sensitive issue in many countries, which are reluctant to recognize the collective right of indigenous peoples to self-determination out of fear that it could threaten state sovereignty and lead to an escalation in claims for independence by indigenous peoples [20,28,34]. There is, however, a difference between internal self-determination (indigenous people have the rights to choose their political allegiances, to influence the political order in which they live, and to preserve their cultural, ethnic, historical, or territorial identity) and external self-determination (indigenous people have the right to determine their future international status and liberate themselves from existing rules, or the creation of an independent state); FPIC refers to the first and not to the second [35,36].…”

From “the Rest” to “the West”? Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Western Bias in Norm Diffusion Research

“…This is of course not to say that these changes were irrelevant. As Engle demonstrates, states succeeded in pruning for instance an explicit reference to collective cultural rights and stressed the notion of state sovereignty despite strong indigenous opposition (Engle :143). Nevertheless, I argue in line with Dorough (:265) that fundamental innovations such as the notion of collective human rights and the recognition as peoples obtained international norm character.…”