Este reporte fue
elaborado por Oswaldo
Ruiz-Chiriboga.
En la revista University
of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law
(Vol. 35, No. 1, 2014) se publicó el artículo titulado “Rights,
Resources, and Rhetoric: Indigenous Peoples and the Inter-American Court” de Thomas M. Antkowiak.
Este es el resumen de la publicación:
“In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
handed down Sarayaku v. Ecuador, a crucial decision on indigenous rights. This
Article considers how the Sarayaku judgment impacts the Court’s case law on
indigenous lands and resources, and evaluates that jurisprudence as a whole.
Examining the cases, it becomes evident that the Tribunal now connects a number
of key indigenous rights to the right to property, Article 21 of the American
Convention on Human Rights. When traditional lands are involved, the right to
property has become the Court’s structural basis for indigenous rights.
For significant reasons, however, the right to property cannot serve as
the conceptual stronghold for indigenous peoples’ survival and development.
First, the Court’s approach limits the autonomy of indigenous peoples and their
capacity for change. Second, the right to property inherently has difficulty
providing even basic protection for ancestral lands because domestic and
international law grants states wide latitude to interfere with property.
Though the Court has attempted to create special ‘safeguards’ for indigenous
lands and resources, they have proven inadequate.
In response, I urge a
distinct way for the Court to conceptualize indigenous rights. The right to
property must be subsumed by, and anchored to, a stronger configurative
principle to defend indigenous peoples’ livelihood. Other human rights regimes
offer the right to self-determination or specific minority protections that can
safeguard indigenous rights. The relevant Inter-American legal instruments fail
to establish such principles. As a result, I propose that a broad right-to-life
concept, known as vida digna in the Court’s case law, serve as the new
structural basis for an array of essential indigenous norms — including
cultural integrity, nondiscrimination, lands and resources, social development,
and self-government.”