To address this deficiency, Natural Justice has produced The Living Convention. Using an integrated rights approach, the Living Convention is an accessible compendium of Indigenous peoples’, local communities’ and peasants’ international rights. By collating provision from separate international instruments by type of right (e.g. Free Prior and Informed Consent or access to justice), the reader is able to quickly assess the extent of international law relating to a particular issue.
The Living Convention aims to democratise international law by providing a straightforward resource for Indigenous peoples, local communities and peasants to refer to when seeking to understand and assert their international rights.
The third edition of the Living Convention (published on International Indigenous Peoples Day, August 2020) is comprised of two volumes:
- Volume I contains a compendium of internationally recognised rights that support the integrity and resilience of Indigenous peoples’, local communities’ and peasants’ territories and other social-ecological systems.
- Volume II sets out the rationale and methodology of the research undertaken to develop the compendium.
The Living Convention also includes annexes. These detail the instruments reviewed, included, and excluded from the Compendium; they provide a list of relevant international and regional judgments; and they reference a number of Indigenous peoples’ declarations.
We hope this Compendium will prove useful to those communities we work with as they seek to understand and assert their rights.
