Indigenous Peoples

Photo credit: The Woods Hole Research Center.

Survival of Forests is Vital for Reaching Climate Change Goals

By Jutta Wolf*

BERLIN (IDN) – A key solution to saving tropical forests is to secure the land rights of the indigenous peoples and local communities, and to invest in them as an effective strategy for reducing deforestation and slowing climate change, according to the new findings released in Berlin on November 1.

It was no surprise therefore when Mina Setra, Deputy Secretary General of The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), said: "We are a proven solution to the long-term protection of forests, whose survival is vital for reaching our climate change goals. Yet in return, we face human rights violations, violence to our communities, criminalization of our peoples and the murder of our leaders." The Alliance represents 17 million people in Indonesia.

: Jutta Wolf; SUSTAINABILITY; Climate Action; 01 November 2017

Photo: Courtesy Tenure Facility / Madre de Dios region, Peruvian Amazon.

Giving Visibility – and Land Rights – to the Indigenous

By Fabíola Ortiz

STOCKHOLM (IDN) – Indigenous peoples are all but invisible on the development agenda but a hoped for change is on the cards with the launch of the world’s first and only funding institution to support the efforts of local and native communities to secure rights over their lands and resources.

“Include us, so that we can protect our lands for our children and protect the planet’s biodiversity for all the world’s children,” said by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples during the launch. Recognising the land rights of native and traditional peoples is a low-cost solution toward achieving the world’s development, environment and climate agendas.

: Fabiola Ortiz; THE WORLD; Latin America & the Caribbean; 07 October 2017

Photo: Eugen Fischer, an infamous German eugenicist who studied “racial mixing” in colonial Namibia, and whose theories inspired Adolf Hitler, and later eugenics researchers at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University. Credit: africasacountry.com

Skeletal Remains of Hereros Give a New Twist to Genocide Case

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK (IDN) – The New York-based American Museum of Natural History is believed to be holding skeletal remains collected by a German racialist scientist who studied the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia.

The find was announced earlier in September 2017 and will be included in a federal class action suit filed on behalf of the Hereros and Nama people by the New York attorney Kenneth McCallion.

The remains were originally gathered for use in experiments. According to representatives of the Namibian groups, skulls and skeletons dating to the German occupation of southwest Africa in the decades before World War 1 still remain in a museum archive. The museum has declined to comment.

: Global Information Network; NEWSBRIEFS; 26 September 2017

Photo: A H/mong hill tribe woman in a village of Sin Chai, Sapa, Viet Nam. Women’s labour accounts for the two-thirds of subsistence agriculture in developing countries, yet they often have no rights over the land. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

Indigenous Women Still Face Huge Rights Challenges

By Phil Harris

ROME (IDN) – Almost ten years have come and gone since the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007, but indigenous people continue to face discrimination, marginalisation and major challenges in enjoying their basic rights.

“The Declaration, which took more than twenty years to negotiate, stands today as a beacon of progress, a framework for reconciliation and a benchmark of rights,” according to a joint statement on the occasion of International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9 issued by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Mariam Wallet Aboubakrine, Chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

: Phil Harris; UN INSIDER; 16 August 2017

Photo: A portrayal entitled The Taking of the Children on the 1999 Great Australian Clock, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, by artist Chris Cook. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Revelations of Australia’s Abu Ghraib Force Gov't to Act

By Kalinga Seneviratne

SYDNEY (IDN) - Screening of secretly filmed shocking footage of abuse of juvenile prisoners in a remote northern Australian prison by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC), renowned investigative reporting program ‘Four Corners’, has outraged thousands of Australians who took to the streets to protest and forced the government to act.

The video material filmed between 2010 and 2014 at the Don Dale youth detention centre in the Northern Territory in Australia and screened on July 25 has drawn comparisons to the treatment of prisoners in the notorious prisons run by the U.S. government in Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

: Kalinga Seneviratne; HUMAN RIGHTS; Indigenous Peoples; 01 August 2016

Photo: A view of participants in the General Assembly Hall during the opening ceremony of the Fifteenth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Indigenous Peoples Insist on Equality of All Rights

Analysis by Rizwy Raheem

NEW YORK (IDN) – The world’s indigenous peoples – estimated at over 370 million living across 90 countries and accounting for 15 percent of the poorest – remain isolated, both politically and geographically.

So, nearly a thousand participants from Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean gathered together to air their grievances before the United Nations at a two-week long conference, which concluded May 20.

Their plea for inclusiveness was a reiteration of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s appeal to the international community on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for a more humane and prosperous world for all – “leaving no one behind”.

The conference ended with a resounding call for greater participation in the United Nations and in UN bodies by some of the world’s most neglected minorities who are increasingly victims of armed conflicts, corporate greed and rising economic inequalities.

: Rizwy Raheem; HUMAN RIGHTS; Indigenous Peoples; 22 May 2016

Photo: UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues opens its 2014 session at UN Headquarters. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Indigenous Peoples Seek Rights and Distinct Identities

By J. Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) - The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and how it relates to indigenous peoples, will feature prominently in discussions at the fifteenth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The Forum will also focus on issues of peace and conflict, often relating to indigenous peoples’ lands, territories and resources and to their rights and distinct identities. More than 1,000 indigenous participants from all regions of the world are attending the gathering at United Nations Headquarters in New York from May 9 to 20.

“Since its establishment, the Permanent Forum has expressed great concern over the continuation of conflicts affecting indigenous peoples in different parts of the world,” said Alvaro Pop, the incoming Chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.