3. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and African Societies

Abstract

Alongside the institutions of local, national and international law, the United Nations also plays an important role in currently on-going legal disputes in Ethiopia, as well as in other African nations, even though it does not want to interfere directly in the internal affairs of these states. Since its direct interventions are strictly limited to peace-building activities and involve long and complicated bureaucratic procedures, one of the UN’s preferred means of contributing to such and other disputes are through the declarations adopted by its General Assembly. These declarations have the character of recommendations and do not contain any legally binding obligations. In the terminology of the UN, they are only ‘documents of intent’. Nevertheless, they try to formulate some principles according to which legal decisions should be taken. This is the case with the UN ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. As I will show, its primary intent was to grant more rights to the marginalized and long-disenfranchised indigenous peoples of the former European colonies in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. But the extent to which its principles can also be applied to African societies remains a controversial point of discussion. On the one hand, the Declaration contains a moral appeal to Africa’s political leaders to help their many small-scale local communities to preserve their language and cultural traditions and to protect them from land robbery at the hands of the big international agricultural corporations. On the other hand, there is also the wish of African governments to unify all societies within a given country under one national law.