ABSTRACT
It would be an impossibility and an injustice to attempt to address the complex international law of human rights, as relevant to minorities and Indigenous peoples, within the limits of a single chapter. However, as a preparation for the model put forward in the next chapter, it is vital to address international human rights law as a kind of aspirational framework to which earlier chapters have implicitly and explicitly referred, and as a foundational basis upon which to build the model of community resources set out in the following chapter. Towards the protection of the traditional resources and expressions of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, a rights-based model has been advocated as the means by which to recognise cultural and social rights in those resources.1 In this model, the duty to uphold those rights is necessarily international, and state responsibility for the protection of those rights extends not only to the citizens within its territories, but also to the systematic sanction (economic or otherwise) of organisations and states which violate those rights. However, concerns persist over the historical and political biases of human rights, and the foundation of human rights law in the
Coombe (1998b); Van Fleet (2003); Hill (2000). See also the call for greater interaction between intellectual property protection and human rights frameworks in Drahos (1999) and the impact of intellectual property protection upon individual human rights in Chapman (2002). On the relationship between trade and human rights, see Cottier (2002). In 1993, the Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples constructed intellectual property rights within notions of self-determination. The IPCB (2004b) has asked the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, in the first in its list of recommendations, to “advise WIPO and the CBD that these forums are not the appropriate forums for the development of international regimes or instruments for the protection of genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore. The appropriate place for these discussions would be under the auspices of the Sub-Commission on Human Rights, such as the Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Note also the discussion of the relationship between cultural diversity and biodiversity in Chapter 6 (see Fourmile (1999): 239), and the inextricable link between cultural knowledge, biodiversity, and human rights seen throughout.
