ABSTRACT
The role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the definition and protection of the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples is well-known. There are two pre-eminent international documents on the rights of indigenous peoples: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, and the ILO's Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989. When the UN itself began for the first time to consider indigenous rights in the 1970s, and indigenous peoples came to organize later in that same decade, Convention 107 came under fire. This chapter gives particular attention to the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, and to special protection by labour inspection and other measures based on the idea that they are often not protected in practice as other workers are. The ILO's main instrument in this area is the Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention 111.
