The Permanent Forum appoints Irma Pineda Santiago and Símon Freddy Condo Riveros, members of the Forum, to conduct a study on collective intellectual property and the appropriation of the ideas and creations of indigenous peoples, and to present that study to the Forum at its twenty-first session.
Businesses, in their human rights due diligence processes, should meaningfully engage with indigenous peoples as rights holders in business decisions and outcomes affecting them. In that regard, free, prior and informed consent should be understood as their right to give or withhold consent.
The Permanent Forum welcomes such initiatives as the indigenous and local community, business and biodiversity consultation, held at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 12 and 13 May 2009, as a useful dialogue between the private sector and indigenous peoples, and encourages further discussions with a view to ensuring the effective implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples while stimulating community-level businesses based on the sustainable use of biodiversity through such creative partnerships.
The Permanent Forum has paid particular attention to the significant increase in the infrastructure budget of the World Bank, from $15 billion to $45 billion in 2009, for the primary economies of developing States. The implications of this development in relation to the respect and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights have to be clearly understood, and the imperative of getting the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples affected by infrastructure projects has to be guaranteed. The Forum also urges the World Bank to provide additional operational budget to manage this large increase in infrastructure spending. The Permanent Forum reiterates its previous recommendations that the World Bank revise its operational safeguard policies to be consistent with the provisions of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The Permanent Forum requests the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, with the support of the secretariat of the Forum, to expand and strengthen the United Nations response to reprisals and threats faced by indigenous human rights and environmental defenders by enhancing high-level engagement on reprisals, ensuring appropriate action on urgent cases when reprisals occur.
The Permanent Forum recommends that States discontinue all sedentarization and other programmes that coerce indigenous peoples to forsake shifting cultivation for other modes of cultivation without their free, prior and informed consent. Alternative modes of cultivation ensure food sovereignty, livelihood security, health security, educational security and forest conservation and other safeguards.
The Permanent Forum denounces the extrajudicial killings of indigenous leaders and activists in several Asian States, as reported by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and urges the concerned countries to investigate these reported cases and to provide redress to the relatives of the victims.
The Permanent Forum recognizes development of renewable energy sources but remains alarmed that irresponsible development related to green technology and the green transition, has led, at times, to violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including mineral extraction and the building of hydroelectric dams and other large-scale infrastructure without the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous Peoples. The Permanent Forum recommends that Member States provide the resources necessary to develop and implement Indigenous Peoples’ own free, prior and informed consent protocols in such contexts.
The Permanent Forum urges other States to provide similar support and urges regional commissions to strengthen their focus on urban indigenous peoples and issues, in particular regarding the implementation of the recommendations contained in the 2006 publication.
Special attention should be paid to indigenous peoples at the High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development to be held during the sixty-first session of the General Assembly in New York on 14 and 15 September 2006. Given that indigenous peoples are closely tied to their communities, the impact exerted by their migration is often broader than that exerted by individual migration. In particular, indigenous migration affects the collective rights of indigenous communities and accordingly has consequences for entire communities.
The Permanent Forum takes note of the 2009 report of the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations, particularly the general observation, and the nine individual observations on implementation of ILO Convention No. 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples. The Forum welcomes the increased attention paid by the Committee to ILO Convention No. 169 and calls upon the Committee to fully incorporate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in its individual observations as a source of interpretation of the Convention.
The Permanent Forum welcomes the initiatives of national human rights institutions, such as those from Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and encourages other human rights institutions to conduct national inquiries on the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, territories and resources.