Cultural Diversity, Legal Pluralism, and Human Rights from an Indigenous Perspective: The Approach by the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The increasing cultural diversity and legal pluralism prevailing in the global South should not always be seen as a threat to a universal concept of human rights, but as an enriching input for it. The progressive recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights in the last decades is forging, sometimes with difficulties, a more open and dynamic conception of human rights. By opening the door to the indigenous conceptions of law, justice, and dignity, both the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are decisively contributing with their progressive jurisprudence to an increasingly more multicultural approach to human rights. The culmination of this complex and somewhat contradictory process took place with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, a clear example of an attempt to balance indigenous conceptions of dignity with the very basics of international human rights law. The aim of this work is to analyze how the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights conceive the problematic but also challenging relationship between indigenous legal pluralism and the protection and promotion of human dignity. The so-called multicultural jurisprudence is paving the way for a more inclusive conception of human rights, a conception enriched by local ways of framing and understanding human dignity.