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Addressee: States, UN agencies, IPOs
Paragraph Number: 4
Session: 5 (2006)
Full Text:
During the dialogue with indigenous peoples on the Millennium Development Goals, many indigenous organizations made statements about the urgent need to redefine the Goals. While the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues appreciates that it may not be possible to redefine the Goals, it also recognizes that there is a clear need to redefine approaches to the implementation of the Goals so as to include the perspectives, concerns, experiences and world views of indigenous peoples. Statements also confirmed that there was a need for indigenous peoples to provide their own definitions of poverty and development and that there should be full and effective participation of indigenous peoples in the implementation of the Goals.
Area of Work: MDGs
Addressee: Member States
Paragraph Number: 4
Session: 11 (2012)
Full Text:
The Permanent Forum recalls the fourth preambular paragraph of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms that all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust. Legal and political justification for the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands, their disenfranchisement and the abrogation of their rights such as the doctrine of discovery, the doctrine of domination, “conquest”, “discovery”, terra nullius or the Regalian doctrine were adopted by colonizers throughout the world. While these nefarious doctrines were promoted as the authority for the acquisition of the lands and territories of indigenous peoples, there were broader assumptions implicit in the doctrines, which became the basis for the assertion of authority and control over the lives of indigenous peoples and their lands, territories and resources. Indigenous peoples were constructed as “savages”, “barbarians”, “backward” and “inferior and uncivilized” by the colonizers who used such constructs to subjugate, dominate and exploit indigenous peoples and their lands, territories and resources. The Permanent Forum calls upon States to repudiate such doctrines as the basis for denying indigenous peoples’ human rights.
Area of Work: Human rights
