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.