Human rights conference waste or time

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Thousands of peoples, many of them Indigenous, have gathered at the United Nations Organization headquarters to discuss the state of human rights in the world in two separate conferences this month.

A Non-Government Organization (NGO) Forum, a collection of more than 1,400 delegates, met for three days June 10-12 to try to put together recommendations for the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights the following week. Indigenous (NGO) delegates met June 10 and 11, in four different meetings, to try and come to some agreement over what needed to be said to the UN. In the end, the unofficial committee came up with six main recommendations, the most significant of which was the need for countries to recognize land rights for Indigenous peoples.

Other Native leaders at the NGO conference, many of them Canadian, also agreed that recognizing land rights within the UN is essential. Tony Mercredi, Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan band in northern Alberta, said that land rights recognition was important, but that conferences like these were most often better used for networking with other Indigenous peoples throughout the world.

Unfortunately, it seems that networking is probably the only thing that Natives will get out of this mess. Actually expecting world governments to pay any attention to their issues is a hopeless dream because the UN could not care less. The World Conference

on Human Rights was not apparently organized to make effective change in the world. It was put together to let people blow off steam.

Three days of NGO meetings followed by two days of talks by world representatives in the general assembly has produced lots of rhetoric and little action. While everyone agrees that human rights violations are a bad thing, no one seems to be willing to do anything about them.

Dissent and zealotry run wild. NGO delegates, the people who qualify as the "grass roots" governments of the world, are actually some of the worst offenders. On the last day of the NGO conference, NGO members from the southern hemisphere almost started a riot during the closing speech by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. While the ex-president delivered a thoughtful oratory on the need to hear other points of view, southern delegates screamed so loud for his removal that only people wearing translator devices could hear him.

That sort of intolerance, the norm at the NGO conference, now seems to be moving to the World Conference one flight upstairs in the Vienna Austria Centre. While UN representatives like Canada's Barbara MacDougall talk about how decent the world has become, other assembly members are talking amongst themselves, listening to other conversations or nodding off to sleep.

Despite the General Assembly's mandate to keep the peace and effect change in

the world, the UN seems bent on remaining. And meanwhile, on the sidelines, are the Natives, perceived by many since the last year's World Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro as simply the quaint Indigenous protectors of Mother Earth.

The UN's Vienna Declaration, the policy document on human rights that's expected from this conference, could be beneficial for Natives, especially if they are recognized as a peoples. But it's unlikely that the UN would ever approve that. So, even as the world discusses the need to enforce human rights, even as the UN's International Year of Indigenous Peoples reaches the half-way mark, it looks as though the only thing many Native peoples will take home from Vienna is perhaps a hotel bill.