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"The 13th of September 2007 will be remembered as a day that the United Nations and its member states, together with Indigenous Peoples, reconciled with past painful histories and decided to march into the future on the path of human rights."

© In Motion Magazine / Nic Paget-Clarke These were the words [pdf] of Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, an indigenous leader from the Philippines, on the day the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was finally -- after more than two decades of geopolitical wrangling -- adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations. As chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Tauli-Corpuz shepherded the Declaration through the long and winding process that ultimately succeeded in establishing a guideline for countries and international bodies to follow when designing laws and policies that affect the world's 300-500 million indigenous people, who occupy some 20 percent of the Earth's territory.

"I think if we talk of obligations and burdens, the indigenous people, who have least contributed to this issue, should have fewer burdens and the right to keep the trees in their forests [and] their oil or minerals in their lands." Most importantly, the Declaration is the only one at the United Nations to have been drafted with the full participation of indigenous people. It is not legally binding on states, but indigenous leaders see the statement as a vital tool they can now use to demonstrate governments' hypocrisy when they don't live up to its standards.

Indigenous people have traditionally been some of the most marginalized and underserved by the governments that purport to represent them. Indeed, many have been forced from their traditional homes and ruled by governments they never assented to. Today they often rank highest on such underdevelopment indicators as the proportion of people in jail, illiteracy rate, and unemployment rate. Many face serious threats to their basic existence due to systematic government policies.

In the face of all this, indigenous leaders across the globe continue to fight to secure their people's basic human rights: from Indonesian tribes threatened by logging to Botswana's Bushmen, who want the right to remain in their ancestral territory (where diamonds have been found), to the Native Alaskans and Canada's Inuit, who want help moving their settlements now that climate changes have made them almost uninhabitable.

As traditional societies who generally depend on and live in very close proximity to nature, the impacts of climate change are already being felt by many indigenous communities, and many are vividly demonstrating the links between climate change and their human rights.

Tauli-Corpuz told delegates [video] at the December 2007 UN summit on climate change how indigenous people from Uganda, India, the United States, Indonesia, and many other countries are being impacted not only by the effects of climate changes, but also by efforts to stop them.

"I think if we talk of obligations and burdens, the indigenous people, who have least contributed to this issue, should have fewer burdens and the right to keep the trees in their forests [and] their oil or minerals in their lands," she said.

"They should be given rewards for these types of actions that they're taking, and those rewards have not been forthcoming," she added, to a round of applause. With a formal UN declaration of their rights to point to, indigenous peoples now have a better bargaining position than ever before.

Click here for OneWorld's Full Coverage on indigenous rights issues, where you can also subscribe to our RSS feed on indigenous rights.

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People of 2007 Homepage