Sunday, December 03, 2006
(11:20 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
Indigenous Rights Revisited
So, on 28th November the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly refused to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples due to a vote on resolutions put forward by Namibia and the African Group to allow for more time for individual states to consider the Declaration - something they claimed they had not had time to do when the Declaration was adopted by the Human Rights Council this June. Of course, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian "big state" lobbying lay behind the African resolutions. The resolutions were adopted and another year of "open, inclusive and transparent discussions" has begun.
Of course, it is the state monopoly of violence and the ability to decide the exception has always been the reason behind refusal of the Declaration. The Declaration will "weaken states" was the argument pounded out repeatedly by the African representatives. This is why Paul Patton argues that "the recognition of native title involves a becoming-indigenous of the common law to the extent that it now protects a property right derived from indigenous law; and a becoming-common law of indigenous law to the extent that it now acquires the authority along with jurisprudential limits of the common law doctrine of native title." In other words, that it is a process of Deleuzian becoming.
What gets me though is that self-determination within states does sound a lot like an opportunity for deterritorialization and "imperialism without colonies." How long will it be before States realize that "Iraq" might work in the indigenous world too? How will these two forces play out?
