The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concluded its seventeenth session today with the adoption of recommendations to protect and advance indigenous peoples’ rights worldwide, stressing that indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories and resources not only serve their own well-being, but also help address some of the most pressing global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biological diversity.
Following a fortnight of meetings, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concluded its seventeenth session this afternoon, adopting a raft of recommendations which reflected this year’s central theme — indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories and resources — and urged the Secretary‑General to convene regional consultations in the coming months on ways to enhance their participation in the work of the United Nations.
Indigenous peoples must be more involved in the work of the United Nations, and allowed to determine who participated on their behalf, speakers in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said today, with some questioning Governments’ commitment to further consider that issue.
Indigenous women faced myriad forms of violence, and in the United States, murder rates that were 10 times the national average, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues heard today, as participants considered the range of problems impairing or outright blocking the exercise of basic rights.
Indigenous peoples were overrepresented among the poor, disproportionately impacted by climate change and systematically targeted for defending their freedoms, experts told the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues today as it covered a range of infringements upon collective rights to lands, territories and natural resources.
Government decisions to build roads, power plants and dams in the name of prosperity threatened the lives of indigenous peoples around the world, speakers in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stressed today, amid calls to protect native lands and resources from such development aggression.
Some 370 million indigenous peoples around the world were being dispossessed of lands their ancestors had called home for generations, speakers in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stressed today, as they opened their seventeenth session amid calls to protect their collective rights to natural resources.
More than 1,000 indigenous participants from all over the world will be at United Nations Headquarters from 16 to 27 April to participate in the seventeenth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. This year’s session is focused on indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories and natural resources.
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message for the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, observed on 25 March:
Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to the Human Rights Council, in Geneva today:
