The Legal Framework behind Biocultural Rights

Abstract

The idea of biocultural rights strives to address the overall issues of indigenous peoples and local communities in relation to the environment and to conflate together the different rights needed to promote their self-government and conservation of cultural identity. Indeed, biocultural rights place themselves in the Anthropocene debate as powerful tools able to provide answers to both human rights and environmental issues. But their environmental focus might raise some issues. This chapter will explore the pros and cons of choosing the path of claiming biocultural rights for, separately, indigenous peoples and local communities. They appear, in fact, as different subjects in international law whose positions are legally diverse. While indigenous peoples hold indigenous rights, a powerful, yet still too often ignored, trump in their hands to be used against States, international organizations, and business corporations, local communities are still fighting to receive protection under international law as a special group and regardless of their contribution to environmental considerations. This difference places them in dissimilar positions vis-à-vis the decision as to whether, or not, to frame their claims as biocultural rights claims.