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Hi. I'm Damien Short. I'm a professor of human rights and environmental justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

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My areas of interest have been genocide studies, Indigenous peoples' rights and human rights. Hi. I'm Chris Chapman.

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I'm the researcher for Indigenous peoples' rights at Amnesty International at the International Secretariat in London. My focus recently has been on conservation and biodiversity

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and how government measures to promote and protect conservation and biodiversity affect, negatively most often, Indigenous peoples and result quite often in eviction from their lands and other human rights violations.

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Thanks, Chris. Well, we'll start off then right at the beginning. How would you define Indigenous peoples and their rights? So I mean, at Amnesty, we go with what international law

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says on the subject. And the consensus is that the starting point is self-identification. So if an Indigenous people claim to be Indigenous,

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normally, that is enough. That's the first point. And normally, it's not questioned. There have been a very small number

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of abusive or fake claims of self-identification. But it's very rare. So normally, that works pretty much fine. If there is a need to go into the details to look at claims,

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then you look at criteria, for example. And Indigenous people would have a unique culture, quite often a unique language, although some Indigenous peoples have lost languages through their-- through the process

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of colonisation, unique spiritual practises, ancestral practises. Indigenous peoples have-- in general, have a collective identity and a collective attachment

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to their lands. And the lands are very much a key part of the identity of Indigenous peoples. They may have lost their lands, again,

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through the process of colonisation. Usually, there will then be a desire to get back to that land. Or they may have been displaced to other lands.

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And obviously, this-- the connection to the land can-- is-- it's a real live thing which doesn't have to remain rooted in stone for all eternity.

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But generally, that is something that unites all Indigenous peoples. And do you see Indigenous rights as being part of the human rights framework or something

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separate? Definitely part of the human rights framework. Yeah, definitely. Indigenous peoples rights are human rights.

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The one thing that people often settle on as being making them different is the fact that Indigenous peoples rights are collective. In fact, some human rights are collective.

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So in the two main human rights conventions, the UN covenants, you have the right to self-determination, which is a collective right. Peoples have the right to self-determination.

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In the African Charter on Human Rights, the Banjul Charter, you have a whole set of rights which are people's rights. So those are all collective rights. So collective rights are not unusual in human rights.

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And Indigenous peoples rights are both individual and collective. So they have individual rights as individual people-- so the right not to be discriminated against,

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for example, the right to identify as Indigenous or not, to opt in or out. And then Indigenous peoples have collective rights, which are the rights to their land,

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the rights to organise themselves, the rights to form their own governments, to govern their own affairs, and the rights to be consulted when government measures affect them,

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and the right to give their consent to or withhold their consent to government measures. And that notion of self-determination was very important when there was that battle over the S,

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wasn't it, in the UN system about the declaration? Peoples have the right to self-determination. Yeah. Interesting.

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Quite a lot of the work I do at Amnesty is to-- it's quite tedious, but it's policing the S. You have to put the apostrophe in the right place to make sure that it's "peoples" and not "people."

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Yeah. Good. Could you tell us a little bit about when Amnesty started to get interested in advocacy

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for Indigenous peoples' rights? So Amnesty has been around since 1961. And I think what people associate with Amnesty, quite often, is prisoners of conscience,

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the death penalty. Those are two subjects that we're very well known for working on. And for initially, for many years, it that was-- that

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was the bread and butter of Amnesty. That was what 99% of our work was on. Over time, that has expanded. And a key point was 2001, when we--

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through the usual processes that-- there was a sort of-- at the international council meeting, it was decided that we would work on

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what's known as economic, social, and cultural rights-- so the right to health, the right to education, the right to a dignified living, the right to unionise. Sort of expanding [? Amnesty's work? ?]

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Yeah. And that helped with-- I mean, that wasn't-- we could-- we were still-- we were

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working on indigenous peoples' rights before then. But that helped in order to work on the full range of Indigenous peoples' rights. But you can go back to--

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I was looking at the archive that this-- the project that we're discussing here. And I was looking through some of the documents in the archive.

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And I found a document from 1971, which was from the secretary general, who was Martin Ennals at that time. And he had written to the UN, asked for a UN resolution,

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which was about Indigenous peoples and basically saying, Indigenous peoples suffer from these violations. And we should do this about it and that about it. It was quite old fashioned because it was sort of-- it

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talked about they should be integrated into society. Right, OK. Assimilationist? Yeah, yeah.

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They thought they were doing the right thing at the time. And the secretary general took this resolution and, I guess, probably faxed it to all of the national sections of Amnesty and said,

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this is very interesting. We've got this from the UN. And we encourage you to take note and maybe incorporate it into your work.

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I felt it so interesting because I was born in the nondigital age and worked in the nondigital age. But it's so seems so unfamiliar now

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to think that you'd have to write to the UN and ask for a resolution and then fax it to people. Yeah, it's quite interesting. But I don't know how much the sections of Amnesty

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took that on board. But you can look back to, say-- I mean, I was going through the archives. And in 1988, there was a report written in--

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on Indigenous people in Brazil. It was quite a long report, and it was a researched report. And it was talking about very gross violations, killings, harassment of Indigenous people, killings

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of leaders, often by miners, small-scale mine-- not necessarily official miners but companies, but small-scale individual miners. And there was a series of urgent actions

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after that for the next couple of years on that issue. So it goes back quite a long way. And of course, those kind of violations would have been the normal sphere of concern

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of Amnesty prior to-- Absolutely. --any specific engagement in Indigenous rights anyway, right?

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Absolutely, yeah. You didn't need a specific policy to say, oh, we're concerned about Indigenous peoples' rights. It comes under the very standard, classic human rights'

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violations that Amnesty would have been working on. Yeah. So over your time working on Indigenous rights for Amnesty and even before, have you

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seen any shift in the sort of discourse or the emphasis on Indigenous rights or elements of Indigenous rights or particular focus on land perhaps or self-determination?

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Or has it been largely the same since the initial engagement? I think there has been a shift. So if we go back to, I mean, that report from Brazil, it was about--

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it was killing of Indigenous people. That was the main concern. I think from when the mandate was expanded in 2001 to include economic, social, and cultural rights,

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there was a desire to look at particular concerns of Indigenous peoples, which very often relate to land rights. I mean, you'll know this through your work.

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And you've written about this. Land rights is-- obviously, it's key to the survival of Indigenous peoples. It's key to their--

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the survival with their cultural identity. So without their land, if they have to, if they're forced to-- forced off their land and forced to relocate and potentially disperse, then they

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cease to exist as an Indigenous people with their own cultural identity. And I think this was also related to Amnesty building up more closer connections

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and relationships with Indigenous peoples and understanding what the concerns were and what Indigenous peoples wanted Amnesty to be doing, rather than us coming in with our mandate.

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Oh, we work on prisoners of conscience and killing, extrajudicial killing, and so on. They would be saying, well, no, actually, our concern-- we are concerned about that, obviously.

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But we, really, if without our land, we cease to exist as a people. So we'd really like you to work on that. So that, I think--

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Greater level of consultation then? Yeah, I think so. I think so. So in--

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Have you seen a shift in terms of emphasis on possible things like resource extraction, perhaps looking if it got more acute over time? I was wondering.

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Definitely, definitely. Resource extraction has been a major issue that we've worked on probably for the last 15, almost 20, years, I would say.

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Yeah, it's not the only issue but definitely one of the major ones. I think around 2010, we did a report in India on a uranium mine, by which was run by the Vidanta corporation,

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affecting the Dongria Kondh people, Indigenous people, in India. And that focused on the mine itself but mainly on the process of how they

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were consulted because the company was saying, we've consulted these people. And they had actually got-- there were actually quite a lot of steps they'd taken, consultations, meetings.

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They had evidence of this. But when we researched it, it was very clear that they'd done a fake consultation. They'd done all they could to put pressure

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on the community to divide and rule, approach certain individuals, and give them-- put certain perks so that they would come on side with the mine, holding meetings when people couldn't possibly

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know about it or couldn't possibly attend, not informing people at all of meetings, and so on. So there is a-- definitely a history of working on resource extraction.

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That sort of brings me, to an extent, to the notion of free, prior, and informed consent, which I think, from my own understanding and work, it was one of the interesting shifts over time

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to incorporate that expression. Yeah. So from that experience, it sounds to me like Amnesty has worked on highlighting

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the fact that it's not particularly well adhered to. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yes, definitely. It has definitely been a major issue

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that we've wanted to work on. I've been at Amnesty since 2014. And it comes up again and again. I've actually developed some research guidelines

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for Amnesty researchers on how to research free, prior, and informed consent because it's pretty tricky. The situations in which free, prior, and informed consent are required are complex.

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We had a research piece that we did in Argentina a number of years ago. And these were peoples who were affected by a lithium mine. So this is actually all about the new green energy,

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so-called green energy. Lithium is one of the main-- Because we need lithium for batteries? For batteries, yeah.

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So lithium mines are just everywhere now. And they're very often on Indigenous peoples' lands. And free, prior, and informed consent was crucial to this piece of research.

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The communities had developed their own protocol for free, prior, and informed consent. They basically said, this is the protocol we want. Anybody who approaches us and wants our consent for anything,

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we want them to use this protocol. And international law says you have to engage with the institutions of the community. And you have to do it in a way which

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is culturally appropriate. So that kind of protocol is a requirement of a free, prior, and informed consent process. I mean, it also showed that the communities ended up being

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divided because the companies were going in, and they were saying, well, this community seems to be in favour. So we'll go ahead with them. And then we'll set them up.

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The community's against it. So we'll set them up against each other and try and weaken them by fomenting those kind of divisions.

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So it becomes very, very tricky. Well, that sort of, in a sense, moves us into the other realm I was interested in talking to you about, Chris.

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How do you see the relationship between Indigenous rights and perhaps what we would now call environmental human rights? Is there much of a connection in Amnesty's work on these two

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issues? Or are they quite separate? No, very much a very strong connection. Yeah.

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Yeah, for sure. So I think, as I mentioned at the beginning, I've been focusing on conservation and biodiversity and how the government measures to promote conservation

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and biodiversity impact on Indigenous peoples. And this is very much connected to the fact that we seem to have an approach to the environment now, where we sit in here--

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decision-makers, governments, and companies tend to have their-- be located in the major cities. And we sit here in our major cities, which are the--

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by the tune of probably 99%, the major contributors to biodiversity loss and pollution in the world, either by directly creating it in the city or by funding it.

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And we expect people who live in rural communities, not just Indigenous peoples but people who live in rural communities, to bear the brunt of protecting what remains of biodiversity.

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So we set up these national parks, marine protected areas, protected forests, not-- we don't do it in cities. We don't worry about the biodiversity loss in cities.

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We worry about it where rural people live. And they are the ones who have to bear the brunt of that. They're suddenly told that they can't live where they've always lived for decades or generations

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or hundreds of years, that that's now a protected area because we need to protect what remains of our biodiversity. I think it is a form of environmental racism.

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It's saying, we're not going to worry about our contribution to this problem. But we are going to worry about your contribution to it. You're chopping down a few trees,

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and that's terrible, whereas we're funding massive fossil fuel extraction. And we don't worry about that as a problem. So I think it's absolutely tied up.

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I think this idea that you have to create a protected area and you have to get all of the people out is absolutely wrong. And it shows how wrong we are about how we approach the issue of nature and environmental protection.

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We have to understand that we are human beings. We're actually part of nature. We are. We should not be seeing ourselves

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as this weird thing which is outside of nature. We are part of it. We have to live with nature. And that might mean chopping down a few trees.

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It's not going to be as huge a contribution to pollution or greenhouse gases or biodiversity loss as city life is. And that sort of ties in with certainly

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a lot of the Indigenous people I've spoken to over the years. The understanding of them being custodians of the land. And I know that's not all, but for a lot of them, they still see themselves in that way.

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So it highlights that link. Yes, totally. Yes. And it's in a way--

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that expression, custodians of the land, is really important. It highlights, in a way, one of the problems with the human rights framework. We've decided that the human rights

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framework has to be channelled through this idea of ownership. So land rights-- you own that land. Therefore, you can't be thrown off it. I think Indigenous peoples have gone along with that

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because they feel that's the only way they can use international law to protect their rights. But I don't think they've ever seen themselves as owning their land.

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They see themselves as looking after it for the next generation, which is how we would have seen it like 300, 400, 500 years ago before the enclosures and the Industrial Revolution.

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Absolutely. Oh, great. Well, that brings me, then, to my final question. How do you see the role, the beneficial role, of the archive

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in potentially helping in this sphere of work going forward? Is there much to be learned, lessons from the past, et cetera? I think there are.

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I mean, in some ways-- I mean, you've already highlighted quite a few of the connections. Yeah.

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I mean, I think, in a way, it's very interesting to look at the archive to see how we looked at Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples' rights and how--

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I mean, from what I was saying before, about how we would focus on one particular issue, the killings of Indigenous leaders in Brazil, and that was related to our mandate.

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Now, I think-- and what I think what the archive helps with is to understand that we've always had a concern about all people and without discrimination, including Indigenous peoples, including ethnic minorities.

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The key was to work out how to do that work in a way that was respectful and was culturally appropriate and didn't take away the agency of Indigenous peoples. And I think the archive helps to show that development.

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There's a really interesting project that started in 2008, which was a campaign in Paraguay on the Yakye Axa and the Sawhoyamaxa peoples in Paraguay.

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They had taken cases, as you know, to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. And they'd won. The Inter-American Court had said--

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had recognised their right to their lands. But the government spent years prevaricating on this and failing to actually give them their land back. And we developed a campaign around that in 2008.

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And at that time, we had this rule that Amnesty sections-- so not the International Secretariat in London but the sections in each country-- couldn't work on their own country's situations.

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And that was to do with-- it's a kind of an old idea, going back to the Cold War, about impartiality that we were very much concerned about impartiality.

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So each national entity had to work on one case from the Soviet bloc and one case from the Western bloc and nothing from their own country to guarantee impartiality.

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I could understand why they did that at the time. But it didn't help with what I was saying before about developing relationships with Indigenous peoples over time and understanding

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what they need from Amnesty. So when that programme, that campaign was developed in 2008, the Paraguay section was not so much involved. And we had researchers mainly coming

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from London or other places to go into Paraguay and doing the research, that this what's called a sort of fly in, fly out or parachute model of research, which is becoming less and less fashionable,

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for good reasons. Now that we've seen a development over time, where the Paraguay section has-- we've got rid of that rule of not working on your own country.

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The Paraguay section has taken on that work. They've developed an amazing relationship with the communities. They work really closely with them.

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They've been doing it for over a decade. And that develops a feeling of trust because I think Indigenous peoples-- well, there's a famous saying about Indigenous peoples

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that they're the most researched people in the world. And that goes back to the old days of anthropology and-- there's many, many bad-- terrifying examples of anthropologists

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going into Indigenous peoples and declaring the truth about these people. And that's something that we do need to get away from. So I think, with that Paraguay relationship

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with the Indigenous peoples, we're trying to move towards a situation where we work really closely with them. They basically come to us and say,

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this is what we need from you. We need you to amplify what we're saying. We need you to get the message out there, not just in Paraguay but to other countries,

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to support our campaign. So I think that's the development you see over time. And I think that can be really clearly seen in the archives. And that's absolutely fascinating

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as well to see that sort of shift from, I suppose, what we would call working now with, rather than working on and for. So it's a much more collaborative--

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and I think that's a wonderful historical aspect to the archive to see that shift over time. And in effect, what you're really looking at is a sort of decolonized methodology,

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isn't it? Yeah, I mean, that's what-- I think we're still not there yet. We're still not decolonized.

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But I think-- Decolonizing. Yeah, yeah. I think that's what we're trying to move towards, definitely.

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Yeah. Great. Well, thanks, Chris. Thank you, Damien.