Welcome to the United Nations
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Paragraph Number: 99
Session: 8 (2009)
Full Text:
The Permanent Forum welcomes the effort of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to establish a regional human rights mechanism and offers its expertise and cooperation in this matter. The Forum recommends that the mechanism be called the “ASEAN Human Rights Commission” and that the commission explicitly recognize indigenous peoples in its terms of reference. We look forward to a strong commission with full investigatory and implementation powers, which uses the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as its framework in dealing with indigenous peoples’ issues. The Forum also recommends that the commission establish a committee on indigenous peoples in addition to its proposed committees on migrant workers and women and children.
Area of Work: Human rights
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
