'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
The rights of indigenous peoples are being abused by authorities and corporations that want access to their land and the resources – such as petrol – that l beneath it, the United Nations expert on the issue on 1 May 2017 said on the sidelines of the 2017 session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, currently under way in New York.
Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Endorsement of the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples does not equal implementation, speakers on 25 April 2017 told the UN General Assembly at a special meeting to celebrate the Declaration’s tenth anniversary and renew commitment to its tenets as a vital solution towards attaining a just and sustainable world.
Credit: FAO
Australia must reduce the “astounding” rates of imprisonment for indigenous peoples and step up the fight against racism, on 4 April warned Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.
Speaking at the opening of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, senior UN officials on 24 April 2017 underscored the need to do more to ensure that indigenous peoples are able to benefit from global development agenda, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Photo: Greenpeace
From Canada to Honduras to Brazil to Finland, Indigenous Peoples face systematic oppression, government ambivalence and corporate greed – and with a changing climate their battles have gotten even bigger. When your life, existence and culture is threatened, you can’t run away – speaking truth to power is the only way to live.
To mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, senior United Nations officials on 9 August called on Governments to improve access to education and ensure that the most vulnerable are not left behind as the journey to achieve the new UN Sustainable Development Goals gets under way.
Indigenous Wayuu children in the village of Pessuapa, Colombia. UN Photo/Gill Fickling
“In some countries, less than 40 per cent of indigenous children attend school full-time. In many others, few indigenous children complete a full high school education,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message on the day.
Maasai pastoralists, who participate in a farmer field school, are selling animals at a local market in Narok, Kenya. Indigenous peoples have a key role to play in addressing climate change. Credit: FAO
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has relentlessly emphasised this new reality.
“Very few countries have so far made a clear commitment to a requirement in the Paris Climate Change Agreement that countries undertaking climate change activities should ensure the rights of indigenous peoples,” she says.
19 November 2015 – Indigenous peoples own, occupy or manage up to 65 per cent of the Earth’s land surface, yet they have largely been excluded from national plans prepared for next month’s United Nations climate change conference in Paris, according to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which is working to address the issue.
UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe (file)
Together with the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change, UNDP is bringing indigenous leaders and high-level government officials together, often for the first time, to ensure that the priorities of indigenous peoples, whose lands are often seized for intensive greenhouse gas-emitting development, are embedded in national proposals for the conference, widely known as COP21.
With the deadline of a post-2015 development agenda looming on the horizon, 2015 is set to be an important year for the security and prosperity of the world’s indigenous peoples, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson on 20 April 2015 affirmed in remarks delivered to the opening of the fourteenth session of the Organization’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Opening of the fourteenth session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. UN Photo/Loey Felipe
“The future well-being of the world’s indigenous peoples is a crucial part of this critical year,” the Deputy Secretary-General declared. “Now is the time for indigenous peoples to be at the forefront of a transformative agenda that leaves no one behind.”
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