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Addressee: Member States
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The Permanent Forum strongly urges Member States to uphold the linguistic rights of indigenous peoples.
Responses
The Government of Spain reports: “With regard to paragraph 13 on upholding the linguistic rights of indigenous peoples, the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI) supported the organization by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Centre of Catalonia of a Seminar on the revitalization of indigenous languages and sustainable development, the purpose of which was to discuss the links between biological and linguistic diversity. The Seminar provided an opportunity for in-depth consideration of the concept of linguistic diversity and its implications for the revitalization of languages. Its conclusions were published in the UNESCO book, “Sharing a world of difference”. This priority was also reflected in paragraph 35 of the Montevideo Declaration: “We recommend that SEGIB should establish a working group, in cooperation with the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) and the Permanent Forum, in order to establish the bases, objectives and scope of the Ibero-American Institute for Native Languages”.
The Russian Federation reports that the linguistic rights of indigenous peoples are regulated by the constitutional laws “On languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation”, “On the state language of the Russian Federation”, “On education”, and by the concepts “On national public policy of the Russian Federation” and “On the modernization of the Russian education system till 2010.” In the field of education, in August 2006 the Government approved, considering the polyethnic character of the society, an ethnonational education policy of the Russian Federation. The document identifies the problems that indigenous peoples face in the field of education and is an update to the current policy on educational development for numerically small indigenous peoples. The Russian Federation will provide the assistance necessary for solving these problems, both on the federal and regional levels. Some urgent tasks to be implemented in 2007-2010 are (a) increasing the professional level of teachers who specialize in the programs with an ethnocultural regional component, teach in native (non-Russian) and second (Russian) languages, or participate in the theoretical or methodological development of ethno-national education policies; (b) creating a new generation of bicultural and polycultural humanities textbooks, also for different civilizational-cultural zones of the Russian Federation; (c) creating management mechanisms to ensure equal opportunity access to quality education, taking into account local linguistic and sociocultural characteristics, also for children whose parents lead a nomadic lifestyle.
Final Report of UNPFII Session 5 (2006)
Area of Work
