Legal Instruments
There is a wide range of rights and responsibilities related to Indigenous peoples and local communities under human rights, environmental, and cultural heritage instruments. These provisions include both substantive rights, perhaps most importantly to self-determination, and procedural rights such as access to information, full and effective participation, and access to justice. The precautionary principle, “do no harm”, and other cross-cutting principles provide a fundamental moral and ethical basis for laws and policies concerning both the environment and Indigenous peoples and local communities.
This section includes links to international and regional Human Rights, Environmental Rights, and Cultural Rights instruments and mechanisms. It also provides an introduction to Case Law and links to Community Declarations, which together constitute an emerging jurisprudence on rights and responsibilities related to Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ ways of life and territory-based governance.
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Publications
Analysis of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Anaya, 2008) |
Towards a People’s History of the Law: Biocultural Jurisprudence and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (Bavikatte and Robinson, 2011) |
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Indigenous and Local Communities and Protected Areas: Towards Equity and Enhanced Conservation (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004) |
Legal Pluralism, Indigenous People and Small Island Developing States: Achieving Good Environmental Governance in the South Pacific (Techera, 2010) |
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Rooibos Robbery: A Story of Bioprospecting in South Africa (Steps Southern Africa, 2012) |
