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Paragraph Number: 83
Session: 21 (2022)
Full Text:

The Permanent Forum appreciates the participation, at its twenty-first session, of the Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes and recommends that the Special Rapporteur urge Member States to guarantee indigenous peoples’ rights to clean water. The Permanent Forum invites the Special Rapporteur to participate at its twenty-second session, in 2023.

Area of Work: Health

Addressee: Member States

Paragraph Number: 83
Session: 10 (2011)
Full Text:

The Permanent Forum urges States to include indigenous peoples in decision-making processes in all areas of water management, including commercial use, irrigation and environmental management, and to ensure that such decision-making processes are consistent with the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in particular its article 32, under which the free and informed consent of indigenous peoples is required prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources.

Area of Work: Human rights, Environment
Paragraph Number: 89
Session: 8 (2009)
Full Text:

The Permanent Forum recognizes the cultural significance and medical importance of the coca leaf in the Andean and other indigenous regions of South America. It also notes that coca leaf chewing is specifically banned by the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961). The Permanent Forum recommends that those portions of the Convention regarding coca leaf chewing that are inconsistent with the rights of indigenous peoples to maintain their traditional health and cultural practices, as recognized in articles 11, 24 and 31 of the Declaration, be amended and/or repealed.

Area of Work: Health
Paragraph Number: 83
Session: 3 (2004)
Full Text:

The Forum recommends that the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna facilitate the full and effective participation, including funding, of indigenous peoples, particularly women and youth, and the Forum in the work to implement these conventions, and involve them fully in policy formulation and in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of environmental programmes or projects.

Area of Work: Environment
Paragraph Number: 89
Session: 3 (2004)
Full Text:

The goals of the Forum in this area are the promotion of cooperation, the exchange of information and the development of partnerships, as well as to improve coordination by facilitating regular contacts and reports. The Forum intends to address and report on this theme on an annual basis. The Forum, reaffirming its recommendations on health made at its first and second reports, in the spirit of the theme of its third session (Indigenous women), recommends that all relevant United Nations entities, especially WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA, as well as regional health organizations and Governments:
(a)Fully incorporate the principle that health is a fundamental human right in all health policies and programmes, and foster rights-based approaches to health, including treaty rights, the right to culturally acceptable and appropriate services and indigenous women’s reproductive rights, and stop programmes of forced sterilization and abortion, which can constitute ethnic genocide;
(b)Further develop and disseminate information about innovative strategies in health services to indigenous women, informed by indigenous concepts and understanding of health, wellness, healing, illness, disease, sexuality and birthing so as to ensure universal and accessible health-care services for indigenous women and girl children, and make available adequate financial and technical support for comprehensive, community-based, primary health services and health education, incorporating traditional indigenous components;
(c)Train and employ qualified indigenous women to design, administer and manage their own health-care programmes;
(d) Set up monitoring mechanisms for indigenous communities to report abuses and neglect with the health system to national health authorities, and put in place the legal framework to effectively address these issues;
(e) Encourage States to include and accredit traditional, indigenous health practitioners (physicians), including traditional birth attendants (midwives), and integrate them into state health-care systems, and give full recognition to the medicinal knowledge and medicines of these indigenous practitioners;
(f) Augment HIV/AIDS programmes by providing educational materials in indigenous languages and by using specially trained indigenous HIV/AIDS health workers to conduct outreach services and home care to indigenous communities, including voluntary testing for HIV/AIDS;
(g) Ensure that indigenous peoples, especially women, have access to all information relating to their medical treatment and to secure their prior informed consent to medical treatment;
(h) Provide appropriate health services and protection services, including safe houses, to displaced refugee and migrant women and women and girl children victimized by trafficking for prostitution;
(i) Implement the recommendations of the international consultation on health of indigenous peoples, held in Geneva at WHO in 1999, with special emphasis on the recommendations concerning the health of women and girls and the role of women in health care, indigenous knowledge and service provisions;
(j)Develop, in conjunction with indigenous women health providers, programmes to inform and sensitize indigenous women and men about cultural practices which have negative impacts on health, including female genital mutilation, child marriages and violence against women and the girl child in the domestic context, in order to encourage them to take precautions and safeguard the health and well being of the indigenous family;
(k)Ensure that the treatment of diseases is balanced by the promotion of health through the support of physical activity, sports and physical education in order to address escalating health concerns through prevention.

Area of Work: Health
Paragraph Number: 83
Session: 22 (2023)
Full Text:

The Permanent Forum reiterates its previous recommendations on the ongoing plastic crisis and the importance of the effective participation of Indigenous Peoples in the negotiations of the United Nations Environment Assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme on an international treaty to tackle the crisis. The Permanent Forum welcomes the discussions of the Human Rights Council on the matter at its fifty-second session.

Area of Work: Environment