Principal speaker
Madeleine Pugin
POSTPONED:
The experience of urban Indigenous groups as rights bearers is a relatively new enquiry in International Relations and international human rights literature. While there has been extensive focus on Indigenous people in rural/remote areas, mostly in relation to land rights and mineral resources, urban Indigenous peoples tend to receive minimal attention within the literature despite more than half of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples now residing in urban and inner regional areas. In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) passed the United Nations General Assembly with overwhelming support. One of the reasons why UNDRIP was created was for the protection of the collective rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide. It is a framework of minimum standards for aspects of Indigenous peoples' lives including land, language, education and culture. In the fifteen years of UNDRIP's existence, its application has been limited - especially within the Australian context. Within this, there is little research at the community level amongst the groups who are meant to be empowered by it. Moreover, a key aspect of UNDRIP is the protection it offers to cultural rights. Those rights include the ability of Indigenous groups at the local level to define their own identity and to have their connection to Country and their right to speak for Country recognised by the wider community. It can be argued that in contemporary urban Australia these rights are often ignored. This research aims to determine the extent to which UNDRIP can support or constrain the exercise of, or recognition of, cultural rights of urban Aboriginal peoples.