ABSTRACT

Since the United Nations officially adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, indigenous peoples’ rights have emerged as a specialized category of human rights. Although the adoption of UNDRIP is fairly recent, the global process that shaped the rights of indigenous peoples began a few decades earlier, most notably through the rise of the international movement for indigenous peoples’ rights in the 1970s (Morgan 2007; Maiguashca 1994). It was an extraordinary process that in many ways challenged the normative establishment of the UN and the scope of international human rights law (Stamatopoulou 2012; Erueti 2011; Holder 2008; Hunt 2000). Among the topics covered by the UNDRIP are issues concerning indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems, hereafter indigenous knowledge (IK).