Indigenous Peoples' Rights

Definition and Composition

Although any discussion of Indigenous rights should, for the purposes of intelligibility, provide a limiting definition of Indigenous peoples, the highly politicized history of definition renders this task extremely problematic. As extensively documented by UN Special Rapporteur José Martínez Cobo in Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, commissioned by the Economic and Social Council in 1971 and completed in 1986 (the Cobo Report), Indigenous peoples all over the world have historically been subject to extensive and frequently derogatory definitions, imposed by the state in which they lived as part of broader strategies of control and domination. Largely for this reason, to allow for the fluidity of Indigenous cultures and to prevent further imposed limitations, Indigenous peoples have vigorously asserted the right to self-definition. This claim has, however, sparked significant resistance from states and has also proved problematic for Indigenous peoples, with groups like South African Boers claiming the right to participate in the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Nevertheless, the most widely accepted definition remains the one developed in the Cobo Report:

Concerned that this definition excludes Indigenous peoples in Asia and Africa, it is now generally accepted that Indigenous peoples include those distinctly different from other groups within a state, for whom ancestral land and territory has a fundamental importance for their collective physical and cultural survival as peoples and who have experienced subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination because of their distinct cultures.

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