A/HRC/33/42
I. Introduction
1.
The present report is submitted to the Human Rights Council by the Special
Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples pursuant to Council resolutions 15/14 and
24/9. In the report, she provides a brief summary of her activities since her previous report
(A/HRC/30/41) and offers a thematic analysis of the impact of international investment
agreements on the rights of indigenous peoples.
II. Activities of the Special Rapporteur
A.
Country visits
2.
Since the thirtieth session of the Council, the Special Rapporteur carried out three
official country visits — to Lapland in August 2015, Honduras in November 2015 and
Brazil in March 2016 — the reports of which will be issued as addenda to the present
report.
B.
Report on environmental conservation measures
3.
The Special Rapporteur will present a thematic report on environmental
conservation measures and their impact on indigenous peoples’ rights to the General
Assembly at its seventy-first session.
III. International investment agreements
A.
Background
4.
In her 2015 report to the General Assembly (A/70/301), the Special Rapporteur
concluded that the protections that international investment agreements provide to foreign
investors can have significant impacts on indigenous peoples’ rights. In order to gain
further insights into the issue she sent questionnaires to States Members of the United
Nations, indigenous peoples and civil society organizations and, in cooperation with the
International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, the
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the Indigenous Peoples’ International
Centre for Policy Research and Education (Tebtebba), organized a series of regional and
global consultations with indigenous peoples and experts in the area of international
investment law and human rights.
5.
This research indicates that there are significant impacts on indigenous peoples’
rights as a result of the international investment regime, in addition to the impacts of the
investments themselves. These impacts are manifested in the subordination of those rights
to investor protections, generally as a result of a phenomenon referred to as regulatory chill
and serious deficiencies in the dispute resolution process instituted by the investment
regime.
6.
The present report is the second of three that the Rapporteur dedicates to this issue.
She has previously introduced the topic and touched on some of the impacts of international
investment agreements on indigenous peoples’ rights and the more systemic issues
associated with the international investment law regime. In the present report, she seeks to
further contextualize and examine those impacts by focusing on cases involving such
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