Self-Determination as Foundation to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights

Abstract

Developed in the 15th Century through a series of pontifical writings, the “The doctrine of discovery” helped western countries to put in place a domination system depriving indigenous peoples’ rights, most especially the rights to a land and access to their resources. That article tries to show that, it is through the self determination that indigenous people can do away with a segregationist system that has kept them into a state of alienation, defend their rights and fight against all sorts of discrimination due to the fact that they belong to a group different from the majority. However, The declaration of the United Nations on the Rights of indigenous people, it acknowledges the right to self-determination enable the indigenous people to get organized to improve their situation on political, economic, social and cultural plans and end all kinds of discrimination and oppressions wherever it is operates. The self-determination can the make it possible to obstruct the forced assimilation policy and makes cultural diversity possible as values of human dignity. The rationale behind this study was to demonstrate that it is only through auto determination that indigenous people can do away with a segregationist system that keep them in an alienation state. It enables them defend their rights and fight against all kinds of discrimination caused by their belonging to a group different from the majority. In the academia, this study helps to understand the principle of auto determination based on the distinction made between “External auto determinations” for claims over independences and “internal auto determination” laying foundations to the claims of indigenous people of recognitions of their cultural, social, economic and political identity in the realm of internal autonomy. This study exposes the relevance of auto determination concept in the overall promotion and protection of right of indigenous people and in its contributions to legal framework related to the matter. Our methodology was mainly of a qualitative kind of research where the primal goal was to offer a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of discrimination of indigenous people, tracing its historical and theoretical background to arrive to the formulation of possible way out towards to do away with discrimination. It was therefore a blend of descriptive and normative form methods that led us to come to make a use of a dialectic form of analysis (thesis, antithesis and synthesis) to arrive to the proposed solutions.