The Forum on Indigenous Issues is deeply concerned that particular problems and discrimination are faced by indigenous children and youth, including in the areas of education, health, culture, extreme poverty, mortality, sexual exploitation, militarization, displacement, incarceration, labour and others
With the expansion of the mandate of the Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Populations, the Forum urges OHCHR to assure a full-time staff position to manage the Fund.
The Permanent Forum welcomes the evaluation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that took place in Guatemala, the results of which were presented to the experts of the Permanent Forum, the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. The Forum recommends that similar practices be implemented by other United Nations country teams and other countries.
The Forum recommends that Member States put in place policies and mechanisms to increase indigenous women’s access to markets and capital in order to enable them to turn their traditional skills into sustainable forms of income generation.
Recognizing that the Millennium Development Goals do not address the specific needs of indigenous peoples, the Permanent Forum urges States to urgently collect disaggregated data and adopt culturally sensitive indicators to monitor the implementation of the Goals among indigenous peoples.
Noting that the Economic and Social Council, at its substantive session of 2003, will devote its high-level segment to rural development, the Forum recommends that the Council, in formulating its conclusions, take into account the unique cultural identities of indigenous peoples and the necessity for their meaningful participation in the planning, implementation and evaluation of programmes dealing with rural development.
The Permanent Forum recommends that the World Bank engage the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Permanent Forum in the development of guidance for the implementation of the new performance standard 7: Indigenous peoples, of the International Finance Corporation performance standards on environmental and social sustainability.
The Permanent Forum acknowledges the project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), entitled “Linking indigenous peoples with regional development”, which involves indigenous leaders and communities in Australia, Canada and Sweden, and encourages OECD and its member States to expand the project.
The Permanent Forum recommends that the United Nations system, the World Bank Group, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank and other multilateral development banks formulate policies to ensure that indigenous education projects that are financed take into account the use, protection and intercultural preservation of indigenous languages through supporting bilingual, intercultural and multilingual education in indigenous languages. The International Monetary Fund should respect the rights of indigenous peoples recognized in international law.
The Permanent Forum encourages States, multilateral environmental agencies and other conservation agencies to adopt a rights-based approach to conservation and follow-up and to systematically evaluate how the rights are implemented.
The Permanent Forum recognizes the right to participate in decision-making and the importance of mechanisms and procedures for the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples in relation to article 18 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Forum reiterates that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Maritime Organization should facilitate indigenous peoples’ participation in their processes.
The Permanent Forum calls on States to ensure that indigenous peoples that are undertaking their own mitigation measures are provided with policy support, technical assistance, funding and capacity-building in order to deepen their knowledge on climate change and to allow them to implement more effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. They should gain benefits from the environmental services derived from their territories and resources. Processes and mechanisms for the valuation of these environmental services, and methods that allow them to get adequate benefits, should be developed jointly with them. Efforts to create better documentation of good practices in mitigation and adaptation and to replicate and upscale these practices should likewise be supported.