The Permanent Forum recommends that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) establish an institutional partnership with indigenous peoples so that they can fully participate in the monitoring and other mechanisms of UNESCO conventions and IFAD projects and programmes that are relevant to indigenous peoples. The Permanent Forum further recommends that UNESCO establish an advisory group of indigenous experts to provide advice.
Governments, the United Nations system and other intergovernmental organizations should develop programs, in cooperation with indigenous peoples, to build the capacity and awareness of their staff to better understand and address indigenous issues
The Forum also decides to give ongoing priority to two other cross-cutting issues: a. Data collection and segregation as a follow-up of recommendations by the technical workshop on data collection; b. Human rights. In collaboration with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Permanent Forum notes the general capacity-building efforts on access and benefit-sharing in the African region carried out under Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) of Germany and encourages further efforts to bolster indigenous participation in those workshops and also in developing workshops specifically for indigenous peoples and local communities.
The Permanent Forum recommends that FAO, in 2014, the International Year of Family Farming, organize and host an expert seminar on culture, food sovereignty and traditional livelihoods to feed into the post-2015 process. The seminar should include the participation of an elder, an adult and a young person from each of the seven sociocultural regions of the Forum.
The Permanent Forum encourages resident coordinators and United Nations country teams to ensure the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples, including indigenous women and youth, in the preparation of the United Nations Development Assistance Frameworks and country programme action plans.
Education in the mother tongue and bilingual education, foremost in primary and secondary schools, lead to effective and long-term successful educational outcomes. The Permanent Forum urges States to fund and implement the Programme of Action for the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, specifically in the following education-related objective. The Forum underlines the need for States to respect and promote indigenous peoples’ definitions of learning and education, founded on the values and priorities of the relevant indigenous peoples. The right to education is independent of State borders and should be expressed by indigenous peoples’ right to freely traverse borders, as supported by articles 9 and 36 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The Forum recommends that States reduce the rates of illiteracy, lack of schooling, truancy and dropouts and raise the rates of completed primary education through literacy campaigns and the design of indigenous, bilingual, inter-cultural educative and extramural models in the States where indigenous peoples live.
The Permanent Forum applauds the good work of the nomadic herders project on enhancing the resilience of pastoral ecosystems and livelihoods, led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)/GRID-Arendal and the Association of World Reindeer Herders. The Permanent Forum recommends that the Global Environment Facility Council approve the project as a good example of a transboundary project by and for indigenous peoples.
Considering their impact on the sexual health and reproductive rights of indigenous peoples, the Permanent Forum calls, in paragraph 62 of the report, for “a legal review of United Nations chemical conventions, in particular the Rotterdam Convention, to ensure that they are in conformity with international human rights standards, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”.
The Permanent Forum welcomes the announcement by New Zealand to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the announcement by the United States of America that it will review its position on the Declaration. It also welcomes the indication by Canada in the 2010 Speech from the Throne that it will take steps to endorse the Declaration. The Forum recommends that the United States and Canada expedite their commitments made to endorse the Declaration
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.