The Permanent Forum recommends that United Nations country teams in Asian countries with indigenous populations, in cooperation with indigenous peoples, formulate a matrix of indicators, benchmarks and milestones to assess the outcomes and results of their policies and programmes relevant to indigenous peoples. Furthermore, the Permanent Forum recommends that United Nations agencies and donor agencies expand their funding and technical assistance to support capacity-building of Asian indigenous peoples’ organizations.
The Permanent Forum recalls the request it made at its fifteenth session (E/2016/43, para. 47) for UNESCO to host a joint seminar with the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other relevant United Nations mechanisms for the purpose of exploring the development of a new international mechanism on the repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains. In this regard, the Permanent Forum deeply regrets the absence of UNESCO from the expert group meeting organized by the Expert Mechanism in March 2020 in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss steps for the implementation of such a mechanism. The Permanent Forum recommends the leadership, involvement and cooperation of UNESCO in efforts to implement the recommendations arising from that meeting, as well as the previous recommendation of the Permanent Forum related to the repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains, including through the creation of an international database and inventory of such items accessible to indigenous peoples as a basis for initiating dialogue. The Permanent Forum wishes to remind UNESCO and other United Nations entities that the repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains is enshrined in articles 11 and 12 of the Declaration.
The Forum decides to devote special attention to the follow-up to global United Nations conferences, and in that regard requests its secretariat to prepare a technical background paper.
Recalling paragraph 40 of its report on its sixteenth session (E/2017/43-E/C.19/2017/11), the Permanent Forum calls on Governments in the Arctic, Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia, along with academics, to take appropriate measures to introduce the endangered languages of their regions into educational practices and include the learning of those languages in curricula at all levels of educational system, when requested by indigenous people.
The Permanent Forum urges the Governments of Canada and the United States to financially support indigenous community education systems and their efforts to protect and perpetuate indigenous languages, on a par with their dominant languages.
The Permanent Forum acknowledges the important work of the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean on its thirtieth anniversary. The Permanent Forum encourages Member States, United Nations entities and indigenous peoples to support strengthening the work of the Fund.
During the pandemic, indigenous peoples have been seriously affected by a lack of access to energy, health-care establishments, education centres, infrastructure that supplies clean water, and communication services and information technologies. Governments have made a range of efforts to support economic activity in their responses to the economic impacts of the pandemic. The relaxation of environmental and human rights standards in order to support activities that will promote economic growth, such as logging, mining, large-scale agriculture and various infrastructure and energy projects, threaten indigenous peoples’ territories. The Permanent Forum requests Member States to include indigenous peoples in the preparatory process and the outcome of the high-level dialogue on energy to be held by the General Assembly in September 2021, in order to accelerate action on achieving Goal 7 and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement.