ABSTRACT
At approximately 10:30 am on 13 September 2007, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, the President of the 61st Session of the UN General Assembly, announced that the General Assembly had before it a draft resolution, entitled the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the voting process on the resolution would begin. One by one the representatives of the UN member states pushed green, yellow or red buttons on their desktops, indicating their vote on the Indigenous rights Declaration, or UNDRIP as it would soon be known. Green was a vote in favour, while red indicated a vote against, and the yellow button was pushed for an abstention. The Indigenous delegates in the back and on the sides of the room, by and for whom this Declaration was written, through whose efforts this day was possible, did not have a vote. They could only sit and watch the screen on the wall, a scoreboard of UN member state votes on the Declaration. The scoreboard lit up as the member state votes were tallied. The final vote showed 143 votes for the Declaration, 11 abstentions, and four votes against (Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand.) Even with official opposition registered by these four powerful states, it did not detract from the absolute jubilation among the Indigenous delegates as handshakes and hugs were freely shared. Andrea Carmen (Yaqui), Executive Director of the International Indian Treaty Council, described the experience, ‘I was so privileged to sit in the Chamber that day, on the floor of the General Assembly, to see the voting on the scoreboard go up and realize that, after all of these years, we got the Declaration adopted’ (Carmen 2007). Grand Chief Edward John from the First Nations Summit, said, ‘It’s a tremendous day. It’s all over now, and we have in our hands a Declaration we helped construct and one on which we proudly stand. Notwithstanding Canada’s “NO” vote … we should all be proud in our collective achievement’ (International Indian Treaty Council 2007). In a press release issued that afternoon, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, stated that:
the 13th of September 2007 will be remembered as an international human rights day for the Indigenous Peoples of the world, a day that the United Nations and its member states, together with Indigenous Peoples, reconciled with past painful histories and decided to march into the future on the path of human rights.
(United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues 2007 )