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Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights under International Law: From Victims to Actors

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Abstract

This book analyses whether the international legal regime provides indigenous peoples with the collective right to live on their traditional territories.
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... Masyarakat Dayak Iban Sungai Utik memiliki wilayah adat dengan luas total 10.067 Ha dan 9.480 Ha diantaranya merupakan hutan adat. (Gilbert 2006). Kesimpulan ...
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Artikel ini berasal dari penelitian dengan pertanyaan bagaimana peran Masyarakat Adat Iban Menua Sungai Utik sebagai Civil society dalam Tata Kelola Lingkungan? Tujuan artikel ini untuk mendeskripsikan peran Masyarakat Adat Iban Menua Sungai Utik sebagai Civil society dalam Tata Kelola Lingkungan. Pertanyaan dan tujuan di atas muncul karena adanya asumsi tentang relasi erat masyarakat Dayak Iban dengan alam, khususnya hutan. Hubungan tersebut menciptakan relasi khusus antara masyarakat dan lingkunganya dalam format tata kelola sendiri yang befungsi untuk mapping dan regulasi etika pengelolaan wilayah. Sebagai bagian dari civil society dalam global environmental governance, masyarakat Dayak Iban Sungai Utik tidak hanya mampu melakukan internalisasi nilai nilai tradisi mereka. Selain itu, juga memiliki bargain position yang cukup kuat sehingga memiliki kekuatan politik untuk advokasi atas hak mereka sebagai masyarakat adat serta terhadap lingkungan. Mereka meraih penghargaan sebagai Kabupaten Konservasi pada 2003. Selain itu, juga mendapatkan pengakuan dan perlindungan hak adat pada 2018, serta Equator Prize Award.
... In terms of the legal framework, one of the rst challenges faced by Indigenous advocates has been the historical lack of recognition of the importance of their right to land under human rights law (Gilbert 2016). ...
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This chapter explores the human right to land from both a historical and a normative perspective. It analyzes the key developments that have led to the recognition of the human right to land in international human rights law. The first part of the chapter explores land as a key component of other human rights, such as the rights to food, housing, property, and other economic, social, and cultural rights. The second part then describes how various international legal instruments came to recognize land as a self-standing human right. It discusses the various dimensions of the right to land and what this right means for different groups, with a focus on Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and other people working in rural areas. Finally, the third part explores current challenges for the implementation of the right to land, with an emphasis on forced evictions and displacements, the gender and intersectional dimensions, and the impacts of transnational corporations. The overall objective is to highlight the benefits of adopting a human rights approach to land issues, seeing land, not as a mere commodity, but as central to the realization of human rights.
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The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources is the third objective of the CBD that constitutes the core of the Nagoya Protocol. Often cited as the “grand bargain”, 1 benefit-sharing was established by the CBD in 1992 in order to provide biodiversity-rich countries and communities with the incentives and financial support for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of its components. 2 It is also the logical consequence of the recognition of the rights of provider countries and IPLCs. According to the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol, benefit sharing should be “fair and equitable”, a standard underlined by the principle of equity that demands benefits to be fairly distributed among those who have created, managed, and developed the concerned genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. 3 Built upon the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol elaborates the rights and obligations related to benefit sharing and provides detailed guidance on a range of key issues of implementing benefit-sharing. 4 It addresses questions of what it is to be shared and how to share them through provisions relating to, inter alia, monetary and non-monetary benefits, measures for capacity-building and negotiations of MAT. 5 Benefit-sharing at both inter-state and intra-state levels—that is, between provider and user countries as well as between states and IPLCs—are envisaged and the normative standards of fairness and equity have also been articulated to guide the implementation of benefit-sharing obligations. 6 In the broader context of international law, benefit-sharing is an emerging legal principle in the standard-setting processes and scholarly discussions of issues relating to, inter alia, health, the use of marine biological resources, and IPLCs’ human rights pertaining to lands and natural resources, non-discrimination and development. 7 This fourth chapter investigates the provisions in the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol with respect to benefit-sharing and examines the applications of relevant international human rights in four sections. It first clarifies the benefits and beneficiaries as defined by the ABS framework (Sect. 4.1), and then discusses the correlated states’ obligations to ensure fair and equitable benefit-sharing especially when IPLCs are concerned (Sect. 4.2). The third section examines the human rights to property, equality and non-discrimination, and development respectively, because they provide the most significant normative ground for theorising the concept, standards and procedures of fair and equitable benefit-sharing with respect to IPLCs (Sect. 4.3). The discussion aims to demonstrate a mutually supportive interpretation and implementation of the Nagoya Protocol in light of human rights law, via critically analysing the normative elements of benefit-sharing such as its nature, form, procedures and standards of fairness and equity. It also addresses the normative and practical gaps and overlaps between the Nagoya Protocol and relevant human rights of IPLCs.
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In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.
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Aboriginal title is a right to land that vests in an indigenous community. Although the title is liable to extinguishment, it survives colonisation without any specific act of recognition by the new sovereign. According to an earlier article on this topic (TW Bennett ‘Redistribution of Land and the Doctrine of Aboriginal Title in South Africa’ (1993) 9 SAJHR 443), the prospect of bringing a successful claim of aboriginal title in South Africa seemed remote. Since then, developments in both international law and Anglo-American jurisprudence indicate that aboriginal title is part of our law and that potential claimants will find it easier to meet the evidential requirements. The article describes the content of aboriginal titles and how they are extinguished. It then explores the possibility of applying these principles to South Africa.
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The fundamental right of indigenous and tribal populations to land and natural resources must be safeguarded if they are to survive as distinct cultural groups, or simply survive at all. Describes the problems encountered by these populations owing to continuing pressure on their lands, and discusses the way in which international standards do and should attempt to protect their rights. Analyzes the existing ILO Convention and Recommendation on the subject, and suggests what changes might be made to meet the needs of these people today. -Authors Internat Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland.
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The challenge for ordinary Australians today is this: that the foundation for compromise … comes from their own legal and constitutional heritage. The Mabo decision is not a product of indigenous heritage. Rather, more fundamentally, it is the product of the country's English heritage: it is a product of the genius of the common law of England.
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It is the year 2097. Ninety years ago the planet Terra was discovered by the Ozakas, a race from a faraway galaxy. Terra was a convenient refuelling port on the trade route to Alpha Centauri and, in addition, had a wealth of natural resources on and below its sea bed, which were almost completely undisturbed. The Ozakas decided to colonize the newly discovered Class M planet. Indigenous sentient beings had already evolved on the planet. They were so far behind the Ozakas in the level of their civilization, however, that they were disregarded as easily as their attempts to resist colonization were crushed. Ozakan colonists settled the planet despite resistance from the indigenous sentients. The land tenure system of the indigenous sentients was primitive: The use of paper and electronic records instead of the universal standard -encoded DNA sequences - was too uncertain and inefficient to be integrated into the Ozakan economic system. In the past thirty years the indigenous sentients have become more assimilated into Ozakan society and have begun to press for compensation or so-called "aboriginal" land rights.
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This paper describes, from the perspective of the advocates for Māori claimants, the substance of submissions to, and process followed by, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in determining that the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 discriminates against Māori. The paper has a number of functions: it illustrates that, contrary to the Prime Minister's suggestions, the process followed by the Committee was robust; provides much needed comment on the Committee's early warning and urgent action procedure; should be useful to other individuals or groups seeking to challenge legislation in international fora; and, finally, sheds light on the Committee's succinct decision by placing it within the context from which it emerged.
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The first part of this article is about the representational practices in the literature. What images - positive or negative - of indigenous peoples are used in this literature? The second part looks at the institutional contexts in which the issues of indigenous peoples have been talked about and acted upon. The role of the International Labour Organisation and the United Nations human rights system is highlighted through two aspects of the institutional literature: its pragmatism and its tendency to cast the expansion and proliferation of institutions as the primary objective within the institutional context. The third part of the article considers the resistance by indigenous poeples not only to the representational constructs but also to the reflexivity of institutional action. Substantively, indigenous peoples deny their asserted primitiveness by claiming the right to self-determination. Procedurally, indigenous peoples claim the right to their increased participation in international institutions. In the conclusion to the third part, explores how the issue of participation by indigenous peoples has been taken up by international institutions, in rhetoric at least. Finally, suggests some possible implications for the more general scholarship of international human rights. -from Author
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This article has two interrelated objectives. One is to give an account of recent efforts by the New Zealand government to return land to Maori. The other is to consider the role of social structure in facilitating or hindering the restitution process. Concerning the return of land, we commence with a brief statement of the historical context, followed by a discussion of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, which initiated a process of restitution, and its 1985 amendment, which gready expanded the scope of potential claims against the government. We then review the government's principles for restitution, relevant legislation and court decisions, and procedures for claims hearings and settlement. In regard to our second objective, we hypothesize that the decentralized power structure of Maori society makes it difficult to resolve land issues, but that tribes with unusually strong leadership will tend to fare relatively well. We also hypothesize that the greater visibility and involvement of Maori in mainstream New Zealand society works to their advantage when compared with indigenous groups in other countries. We address our first hypothesis with comparative case studies of the successful Waikato-Tainui claim, submitted by a highly centralized tribe, and the unresolved Muriwhenua claim, submitted by a more typical group that lacks strong leadership. We then explore our second hypothesis by comparing the role of Maori in New Zealand society with that of indigenous groups in Australia, Canada and the United States. In particular, we note that Maori make up a relatively high percentage of the population, they are highly concentrated in urban areas, and they do not have to compete for attention with any other sizable ethnic or racial minority groups.