Business and Human Rights: Indigenous Peoples Experiences with Access to Remedy: Case Studies

Throughout history and throughout the world indigenous peoples have suffered disproportionately from the negative human rights impact of business activities in their territories. This pattern continues to the present day, with devastating effects for the survival and flourishing of indigenous cultures and ways of life. Serious rights violations continue to arise as a result of forced displacement, dispossession of territories and devastation of lands and resources. In an alarming number of cases, efforts by indigenous peoples to assert their rights and to seek redress are met with criminalization and the use of force, resulting in violence and leading to physical injuries, social disruption, physiological suffering and, in some cases, death. Basic social and economic rights are systematically denied and indigenous peoples? cultural and territorial integrity is repeatedly violated. In such contexts the exercise of indigenous peoples? foundational right to self-determination has been restricted to a struggle to survive as peoples, as opposed to a fundamental freedom to determine their own social, cultural and economic development. The adoption by the UN General Assembly of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (henceforth the UNDRIP) in 2007 promised a new era of respect for indigenous self-determination and represented an important step towards remedying past wrongs and preventing future harms.