Call to Action: Demand OAS Support a Strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Demand a Strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous rights to life, land, equality, natural resources, self-determination, and religious freedom are under attack. A strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will help prevent human rights violations in the Americas.

• Gross violations of human rights are occurring against Indian and other indigenous peoples in North, South and Central America.
• Developers deprive Indians in the United States of their right to religious freedom by desecrating sacred places such as Bear Butte and the San Francisco Peaks.
• One in three Indian women in the United States will be raped in their lifetimes. This epidemic of violence violates Native women’s rights to life, security of the person, and equal treatment.
• The United States continues to try to take Western Shoshone HOMELANDS for military testing, gold mining and nuclear waste disposal in violation of Western Shoshone property rights.
• More than 1,244 indigenous people have been assassinated in Colombia in the past five years.
• Maya Q’eqchi’ people suffer death threats, the burning of their homes, and forced removal for defending their land rights from mining interests in El Estor, Guatemala.
• Canada continues to ignore Innu land rights, resulting in the forced relocation of Innu families and the loss of their traditional hunting grounds and homelands.
• More than 3,000 illegal miners threaten the survival of the Yanomami people in Brazil by invading their lands, contaminating their rivers, introducing fatal infectious diseases, and murdering their people.
  
  This persecution is not unique to particular countries. It is part of an alarming trend of human rights violations against indigenous peoples in North, Central, and South America. Indigenous rights to life, land, equality, natural resources, self-determination, and religious freedom are under attack. The Organization of American States, a regional body made up of the 35 countries of the Americas, is currently negotiating an American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Countries of the Americas must commit to the recognition and implementation of indigenous rights by adopting the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
  

ACT NOW FOR A STRONG AMERICAN DECLARATION by sending letters to OAS member countries urging them to support a strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. [click here to send letter]

Following is a copy of the letter you will be sending to the government of every nation that is a member of the Organization of American States (OAS). (You will also have to opportunity to include any personal comments or statements.)

"Dear Ambassador,

I am seriously concerned about the widespread violation of indigenous peoples' human rights in the Americas and the need for a strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I strongly urge your country to commit to the adoption of a strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by actively engaging in negotiations immediately.

A strong American Declaration is crucial to recognize indigenous human rights, including the right of self-determination, treaty rights, cultural and religious rights, rights to lands and resources, and more. Further, a strong American Declaration will address the particular regional issues in the Americas that are not dealt with in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, such as gender equality, violence against Native women, and indigenous peoples under internal armed conflict.

More importantly, we need a strong American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to prevent the grave treaty and human rights violations that Indian and Alaska Native nations currently face in the United States and throughout the Americas. In the United States, the government is allowed to confiscate certain Indian lands in violation of the Constitution, one in three Native women is raped in her life time, and developers deprive Native peoples of their right to religious freedom by desecrating sacred places such as Bear Butte, South Dakota.

The situation is even more appalling in Central and South America. Extractive industries threaten the survival of many indigenous nations, including the Yanomami in Brazil and the Maya Q'eqchi' in Guatemala, and indigenous peoples are being assassinated in Colombia. A strong American Declaration will help to secure Indian rights and prevent further human rights abuses. The OAS and OAS member countries must commit to the adoption of a strong American Declaration.

It is more important than ever to have a strong American Declaration which enjoys widespread support. In 2007, 143 countries affirmed their commitment to indigenous rights through their historic adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four countries voted against the Declaration. Three of those four -- the United States, Canada, and Colombia -- belong to our region, which has some of the largest indigenous populations in the world. All countries of the Americas must take their obligations to respect and promote indigenous rights seriously.

Thank you in advance for your country's commitment to the negotiation and adoption of a strong American Declaration.

Sincerely,

[Your Name, Organization, Address, Phone & Fax]"

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The Indian Law Resource Center is a non-profit law and advocacy organization established and directed by American Indians. We provide legal assistance to Indian and Alaska Native nations who are working to protect their lands, resources, human rights, environment and cultural heritage. Our principal goal is the preservation and well-being of Indian and other Native nations and tribes.

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This article has been adapted from Indigenous Notes
the newsletter of the Indian Law Resource Center

Native Rights News is making this material available with the express permission of the Indian Law Resource Center . This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.
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OAS Condemns FARC Assassination of AWA Indians and Demands Return of Bodies

Media-Newswire.com
Released February 26, 2009

THE OAS UNANIMOUSLY CONDEMNS THE ASSASSINATION BY THE FARC OF THE INDIGENOUS GROUP AWÁ AND DEMANDS THE HANDING OVER OF THE BODIES

The Permanent Council of the Organization of American States ( OAS ) passed with unanimity a Declaration in which it expressed its "most energetic condemnation of the assassination of Colombians from the indigenous group AWA by the FARC ( Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ), which occurred at the beginning of this month.

The document emphasizes, "the need to hand over the bodies of the AWA indigenous people that have not yet been recuperated" and demands an investigation and adoption of the necessary actions to "sanction those responsible of this crime."

Simultaneously, the Permanent Council offered "its solidarity and most sincere condolences to the families of the victims, the indigenous community AWA, the citizens, and the Colombian government for this atrocious crime."

The Declaration was submitted for consideration to the Council by the OAS permanent representative of Colombia, Ambassador Camilo Ospina, and after the document’s approval, the diplomat thanked the "firmness in which the hemisphere condemns barbarian acts, such as the massacre on the AWA people. The world must know that such serious events cannot occur without the firm condemnation of all the OAS States," he said.

It must be recalled that in a press release delivered last February 18th, OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, expressed his most energetic repulse and condemnation for the assassination of the indigenous group AWA that took place in the locality of Barbacoas, in the Colombian department of Nariño.
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(c) Media-Newswire.com 2009

Native Rights News is making this material from Media-Newswire.com available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

FARC Retaliates Against Awa Indians by Taking 120 Hostages

Latin American Herald Tribune
Published February 17, 2009

Colombia FARC Takes 120 Indians Hostage

BOGOTA -- A total of 120 Awa Indians were taken hostage last week in southwestern Colombia by presumed leftist FARC insurgents, who killed at least eight of the captives, two indigenous rights organizations said Wednesday.

The members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel army also returned for the children who had been left alone in their homes, although it remains unclear what happened to those youths and how many of them there were, according to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, or Onic, and Indigenous Unity of the Awa People, or Unipa.

In a joint statement released in Pasto, the capital of Nariño province where the abductions and killings occurred, the two associations offered details on the murder of eight Awa Indians and the disappearance of nine others.

Onic and Unipa said the mass abduction occurred Feb. 4 within the limits of the Tortugaña Telembi reservation, located amid jungle-clad mountains near the town of Barbacoas, and was carried out by "armed men with FARC emblems."

The kidnapped Indians "were taken with their hands tied to he so-called El Hojal stream of the El Bravo (indigenous) community," the statement said, adding that witnesses saw the insurgents kill "some people with knives."

The FARC guerrillas returned the following day for the children who had been left alone, but "we don't know what happened to them," the statement said.

New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, said Tuesday on its Web site that 17 Awa Indians were killed and called on "the national, state, and local governments to take immediate action to provide assistance to the displaced population and victims, to protect the civilian population in Nariño, and to ensure that all abuses in the region, by all armed groups or forces, are thoroughly investigated and prosecuted."

HRW also said the Office of the Ombudsman of Colombia had issued a report prior to the kidnappings alerting authorities that "civilians in the region were at risk" because the FARC suspected the Awa of cooperating with the army and a rival insurgent group.

It urged the Colombian government to improve its response to such warnings.

Onic and Unipa, for its part, did not say if those Indians taken captive were still being held by the insurgents.

They said the Awas believe the guerrilla incursion was in retaliation for supposed support the Indians have lent military troops who have entered their territory.

The rebel presence has left some 1,300 Awas "confined," or cut off from the outside world, according to Onic and Unipa, whose leaders met Tuesday in Pasto to analyze a crisis whose antecedents date back to the past decade, always related to Colombia's long-running internal armed conflict.

According to the two associations, some 200 Awas have been killed since the 1990s, with several of the deaths occurring in four separate massacres. Another 50 have been killed by landmines, while many more have been arbitrarily detained, kidnapped, threatened or recruited by illegal armed groups.


Fighting in that region has led to mass displacement of the Awa population, including cases of cross-border migration due to the bi-national Colombo-Ecuadorian nature of the Awa ethnic group, the statement added.

They said these communities also have suffered blockades and their property has been confiscated by the different armed actors in Colombia's civil conflict.

The Onic and Unipa also said last week's abductions and killings coincided with fighting between the Colombian army and the FARC between Feb. 5-7.

But the army's Cali-based military division, responsible for security in Nariño, said there have been no armed clashes in recent months in the 24,960-hectare (96-square-mile) expanse of the Tortugaña Telembi reservation. EFE
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Copyright Latin American Herald Tribune - 2008 ©

Native Rights News is making this material from The Latin American Herald Tribune available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

UNHCR Calls for Colombian Probe in Retaliation Murders of 17 Awa Indigenous people

UNHCR urges Colombian probe into killing of 17 indigenous people

BOGOTA, Colombia, February 10 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency called Tuesday for a thorough investigation into the reported murders last week of 17 Awá indigenous people in a remote area of south-western Colombia.

"We strongly urge all parties involved to respect international humanitarian law and ask the Colombian government to fulfill its obligations to protect civilians and take special measures for the preservation of indigenous people," said a UNHCR spokesperson.

According to initial reports from provincial and local authorities, the victims include two women and a child and were killed last week on Awá collective territory in the Colombian department of Nariño. The rest of the population is now extremely frightened amid increasing concerns over a mass displacement of people in the days to come.

The area, located along the Telembi River between the villages of Ricaurte and Barbacoas, is remote and extremely difficult to reach. In some areas, there are many landmines. According to first reports, which are not yet possible to fully verify, the 17 indigenous people were murdered in a retaliatory attack carried out by an irregular armed group against the civilian population following the arrival of the Colombian armed forces.

The UNHCR field office in Nariño has been working closely with the Awá people, who like many Colombian indigenous groups have been struggling for years to keep out of the country's internal conflict. The Awá in this part of Nariño live on protected collective territory, but this has not stopped armed groups from entering their lands.

As a result, they have been subjected to severe rights violations, including constant pressure and persecution, repeated murders and forced displacement. They have repeatedly been forced to flee their ancestral lands over the past few years. Some have crossed the border to take refuge in neighbouring Ecuador. The use of landmines by irregular armed groups on their territory is another source of terror and forced displacement.

Ron Redmond, chief UNHCR spokesperson, told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday that the refugee agency was "shocked and saddened at the reported killings and we express our condolences to the Awá people, reiterate our support to their right to live peacefully on their own territory, and reaffirm our commitment to keep working with them.

"We also call for an urgent and independent inquiry into the reported incident and for quick and effective prevention measures as outlined in a series of early warnings repeatedly issued by Colombia's Ombudsman Office for the Nariño region."

With 21,000 people, the Awá are the largest indigenous group in Nariño, a department that suffers some of the worst violence and forced displacement in Colombia. For the past two years, Nariño produced more than 10 percent of all cases of new forced displacement in the country.

More than 300,000 people were displaced in Colombia in 2007 and preliminary 2008 figures show a similar trend, bringing the total number of registered internally displaced people to more than 2.8 million.

The Awá people are one of 87 different indigenous groups in Colombia. More than a third of these groups are at risk of extinction, largely as a result of armed conflict and forced displacement. Their survival depends greatly on being able to remain on their ancestral territories and maintaining their close links to the land. The Colombian constitution recognizes them as people with special rights and specific protection needs.

With 12 offices in Colombia, UNHCR works with the government to help it fulfill this protection duty and with indigenous organizations all over the country. Part of that effort has been a campaign to raise awareness of the magnitude of a crisis that unfortunately continues year after year.

By Marie-Helene Verney
in Bogota, Colombia
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Copyright 2001-2009 UNHCR

Native Rights News is making this material from United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

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Posted By Alliance for Indigenous Rights to Native Rights News at 2/11/2009 09:31:00 PM

OAS Moves Forward on DRIP Taylored to Needs of Indigenous Peoples

Draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples moves forward

By Gale Courey Toensing

Story Published: January 9, 2009
Story Updated: January 9, 2009

WASHINGTON – An international human rights declaration geared specifically toward meeting the legal needs of the indigenous peoples of the Americas took a step forward last month when the Organization of American States' working group in charge of preparing the Draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples held a special session in Washington.

Around 50 indigenous representatives from the Americas attended the special session Dec. 9-12 at OAS headquarters in the Simón Bolívar Room. The OAS is an international body comparable to the United Nations that consists of 35 nations in the Americas. It is the region's principal multilateral forum for strengthening democracy, promoting human rights, and dealing with shared problems such as poverty, terrorism, illegal drugs and corruption, and carries out mandates established by the hemisphere's leaders. Visit the group's Web site at http://oas.org/.

The working group is involved in final revisions of the text, working out issues related to the process of negotiation, and pinpointing the particular issues unique to the hemisphere's indigenous peoples that should be reflected in the declaration.

December's special session was not a negotiating session, but nevertheless presented challenges, said Leonardo Crippa, a Kolla member from Argentina, and staff attorney at the Indian Law Resource Center, which has been participating in the process of developing the American Declaration since its beginning in 1989. The center's Web site can be viewed at http://indianlaw.org/.

"In negotiating sessions we usually negotiate the language that will be in the text of the American Declaration, but this time even though there were no negotiations there were some challenges, for instance, the identification of the particularities of the region that this American Declaration should reflect. That was challenging because we needed to reach some sort of agreement between the indigenous representatives and the state representatives," Crippa said.

There is consensus among the indigenous representatives, but one of the major challenges has been to get the U.S. government under the Bush administration to ratify any human rights treaty. The U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were the only four nations that voted against adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 13, 2007.

The U.S. government has submitted statements to the working group outlining its general reservations about the outcome of each negotiation session. It also submitted 10 principles of the rights of indigenous peoples that it believes were already achieved in the negotiation process.

"And by doing this the U.S. basically said, 'Well, since we are submitting our general reservations on this with the 10 principles, we're not going to be involved actively in the discussions,' and that's what they've been doing for almost one year."

Canada and Columbia fall in line with whatever the U.S. wants.

The U.S. still sends representatives to the sessions, but they are observers only and not actively involved. There is hope that will change with the Obama administration, he said.

The American Declaration will complement the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Whereas the U.N. Declaration makes a universal and broad statement of rights, the American Declaration will address the particular needs of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Crippa said the special session in December was successful in defining the articles of the Draft American Declaration that are close to agreement and will become part of the negotiation sessions this year, and in identifying the regional particularities that should be reflected in the Draft American Declaration.

In Columbia, for example, there is an internal armed conflict that is imposing human rights violations on indigenous peoples there, Crippa said. Another regional particularity is the regularity with which states fail to comply with treaties they've signed with indigenous peoples. And there is the case of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation in the Amazon and regional countries like Peru, Columbia and Ecuador.

The sensitive areas basically relate to property rights, land uses, natural resources, self government and self determination.

Indigenous peoples are threatened by destructive industrial projects on or near their territories – mining, oil drilling, construction and logging. This is an issue faced both by American Indian tribes and indigenous peoples in developing countries.

"And a big particularity is the existence of indigenous peoples with their own judicial system, with their own government, with their own legislative organizations which is something that is occurring here in the U.S.," Crippa said.

These issues often end up in U.S. courts with rulings against the tribes. The American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will provide the standards for the administration of justice and the OAS to provide the international venue to adjudicate these cases.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is an autonomous organ of the OAS and is one of two bodies in the inter-American system for the promotion and protection of human rights. The commission has its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The other human rights body is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which is located in San José, Costa Rica.

"Both the Inter American Commission and the court will interpret the American Declaration because they will have jurisdiction to do that legal work whenever they have a case concerning human rights violations of indigenous peoples," Crippa said.

That means the American Declaration will, in fact, be more effective on the ground than the U.N. Declaration because it will be implemented through an already existing court system. At the U.N. level, there is no international human rights court.

"It's a big difference," he said.

He said the Inter-American Court and domestic courts in Mexico and central and South America have already used the standards of the Draft American Declaration in deciding indigenous cases, so a body of case law is being built that will set precedent for future legal actions.

Just as most international human rights laws started out as declarations, the Draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the first step toward becoming an international convention or treaty.

The working group will hold meetings in Washington Jan. 26-30 and March 23-27. Once the indigenous and state representatives agree on the language of the declaration, the working group will submit the text to the OAS General Assembly for adoption by a vote of all the American member states.

"I think some time in 2010 it will be adopted."

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© 1998 - 2009 Indian Country Today

Native Rights News is making this material from Indian Country Today available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

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Posted By Alliance for Indigenous Rights to Native Rights News at 1/13/2009 08:42:00 AM