Key Reflections on the UN Report on Mobile Indigenous Peoples

Key Reflections on the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on Mobile Indigenous Peoples. A/79/160. 

·      Mobility is crucial to Mobile Indigenous Peoples identity and lifeways. Mobility is a complex concept which incorporates elements of social, political, economic and religious and philosophical components.

·      Mis-understandings of mobility, whether they be intentional or not, have resulted in devastating impacts on Mobile Indigenous Peoples, including sedentarisation and forced assimilation, dispossession and dislocation.

·      These policies have a deleterious effect on women who are the knowledge and tradition holders for communities. Removing mobility isolates women, prohibits economic engagement and results in diminished status within communities.

·      Mobility has been poorly understood by development organisations, as concepts from sedentary tenure rights frameworks dominate discussions even on Mobile Peoples rights, due to a failure to comprehend the complex nature of flexible land use over extensive territories based on the requirement of adapting to ever changing economic, environmental, and social conditions.

·      Mobility is a basic requirement for adapting to changing environmental and social conditions especially due to the instability caused by climate change impacts.

·      Climate change confronts Mobile Indigenous Peoples with unprecedented challenges, including land degradation, exaggerated floods and droughts, associated desertification and deforestation and loss of biodiversity that threaten the  food sovereignty of Mobile Indigenous Peoples. These problems stem mainly from continued emissions from the use of fossil fuels predominately generated in the US and China, yet we are too often targeted as emitters just for continuing our traditional lifeways, while extractive industries continue unchallenged.

·      Call on states to recognize the continued and historical the significance of the mobility as a fundamental human right amongst these Peoples.

·      Call on states to endorse the SR Report’s Recommendations and the Dana+20 Manifesto formulated by Mobile Indigenous Peoples worldwide.

UN Report on Mobile Indigenous Peoples.pdf

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