Celebrating 22 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the first legally binding international instrument affirming human rights for all children, the Permanent Forum welcomes the adoption of the third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure, enabling individual claims and the use of the examination process, and urges States to accede to this important instrument regarding children in the most vulnerable situations, many of whom are indigenous, to allow them access to recourse and redress.
The Permanent Forum urges the World Intellectual Property Organization, UNESCO, the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and other relevant United Nations entities to align their internal policies, within their respective mandates, so as to recognize and protect the collective intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples in respect of their creations, discoveries, traditional knowledge and knowledge of biodiversity. The Permanent Forum invites the above-mentioned United Nations entities to report back to future sessions on the progress made in that regard.
The Permanent Forum urges United Nations organizations, non-governmental organizations, States and other supportive organizations to facilitate, support and fund local, regional and international youth activities and other upcoming training workshops and forums.
The Permanent Forum requests that UNICEF prepare a report on the state of the world’s children, with a thematic focus on indigenous children. The report should give special attention to the implementation by Member States of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and general comment No. 11 (2009) of the Committee on the Rights of the Child on indigenous children and their rights under the Convention. Furthermore, the Forum requests UNICEF to begin to disaggregate data on indigenous children, including from its existing database.