Say one thing; Do another?

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Canada on the international scene

Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham has stated on more than one occasion that he wants to see the draft declaration on Indigenous rights completed. But several sources wonder how that can happen when Graham's own departmental officials have been part of the reason it has been stalled so badly so far.

Graham has been told by many Indigenous and human rights advocates that there is a "disconnect" between what Canada says about Indigenous rights and what Canada does.

In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly launched the International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples to "increase the United Nations' commitment to promoting and protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide."

Work at the international level was broken down into six main areas: economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights.

A working group on the draft declaration of Indigenous peoples was struck. State and Indigenous representatives meet for two weeks each year in Geneva to try to reach agreement on changes to the draft declaration that was submitted by a team of experts in 1994. Of the 45 articles in the draft document, only two have been ratified during the first nine years-the nation-state representatives have signed off on the fact that Indigenous peoples have the right to a nationality and that male and female Indigenous people have equal rights.

The next session for the working group-and the last meeting during the Indigenous Decade, which ends this year-is scheduled for September in Geneva.

Many of the same players involved with the working group are involved in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which held its first session from May 12 to 24, 2002 at United Nations headquarters in New York.

There are eight Indigenous members and eight nation-state representatives on the 16-member permanent forum, which has two Canadians members: Wayne Lord, a Metis man who is the Department of Foreign Affairs' director of Aboriginal and circumpolar affairs, and J. Wilton Littlechild, an Aboriginal lawyer from Edmonton, who is the North American Indigenous representative.

Littlechild has spent 22 years working on international issues. He represents the International Organization of Indigenous Resource Development, an officially recognized United Nations non-governmental organization (NGO) made up of the four nations at Hobbema, Alta. and 42 oil-and-gas producing tribes in the United States.

Littlechild met with Graham in Edmonton last year. He told the minister that Canadian officials at the permanent forum were working in concert with officials from the U.S., New Zealand and Australia to frustrate progress on Indigenous rights.

Littlechild told Windspeaker that time is running out on the process.

"There's a general assembly resolution saying to all the member states to pass the declaration before the end of the decade. The decade runs out this year and there's only one meeting left," he said. "Now, based on the nine years of resistance by member states on getting the current declaration passed, it took them nine years to pass two articles. So what makes anyone think they're going to pass 43 in one meeting?"

He said his requests for a meeting with the Foreign Affairs minister were blocked by the bureaucracy.

"There's tremendous concern, at least from our perspective, about the status of the declaration. So stemming from that concern, I asked for a meeting and I think I was blocked, probably within the bureaucracy because [the minister] was surprised to know that I had requested meetings with him. And I had done that in writing on previous occasions. We got to meet and I told him about the concern that the declaration may not be going anywhere and it's basically because of Canada's resistance and the U.S. resistance along with New Zealand and Australia," he said.

Prime Minister Paul Martin's activities and tatements at the international level led Littlechild and others to believe they would be able to rely on Canada's support. He told Graham as much.

"The recently appointed prime minister had just been quoted as saying that he wanted Canada to be known around the world as an international leader. I said the best opportunity we have is for you, Canada, to lead the way and show the world with good positive working relationships and partnerships that you can advance the rights of Indigenous peoples. If you want to be a real leader, you're going to have to change the position that you've taken at the UN on the declaration because they've certainly been less than helpful in terms of advancing our rights," he said. "They've been resisting certain articles by proposing alternative wording and at the last meeting proposed alternative wording that was really confrontational and I think showed their real face in the international community. So I said 'We want to work with you and we want to make sure we have a strong declaration, but for that to happen you're going to have to change your position.'"

But after that meeting, Foreign Affairs bureaucrats held a meeting with the five national Aboriginal organizations and did not invite the longest serving and most experienced Aboriginal groups, Littlchild's and the James Bay Crees.

"We're being shut out again and we're being labelled, we being the International Organization of Indigenous Resource Development, which is an accredited NGO at the UN along with the International Treaty Council [and the James Bay Crees]. We're labelled as the obstructionists."

He believes the bureaucracy is working with less experienced Aboriginal groups in order to water down the final version of the declaration.

"When I asked for the [second] meeting, I knew this was going to happen so I cautioned the people, I said, 'Don't call a meeting without the main players that have been fighting this case for the last 22 years at the table. Our goup has been the most consistent in representation and position in the last two decades now. We've seen a lot of faces change. If you want consistency and proper representation, do not exclude our chiefs, people who have been there making these arguments in some cases in the absence of the other five major partners.' I just wanted to get the proper people at the table so that we can share information."

With the alarming lack of progress, some have called for a second Indigenous decade. Littlechild sees that as a trap.

"You should not proclaim a second decade under which you postpone the adoption of the UN declaration for another 10 years," he explained. "This will be the first non-legally binding United Nations instrument that will have taken over 30 years to adopt. They shouldn't link the two. I think we could continue working on the declaration rather than, 'Whoopee, we have another 10 years to work on it.'"

Littlechild said it's just a matter of time before nation-states accept the reality that they can't use their authority without limit and trample on human rights.

"Indigenous people are going to win this struggle because justice is on their side, but the question is whether it's going to take 1,000 years or 80 years," he said.

A Feb. 12 press release jointly issued by Montreal-based Centre for Rights and Democracy, the Quaker Aboriginal affairs committee, Amnesty International Canada and KAIROS, a coalition of church groups with an interest in justice initiatives, laid out six key questions for the government of Canada to answer.

The groups asked the federal government to list which articles it can support and which it cannot and tell them why.

Craig Benjamin of Amnesty International Canada said his organization is seeing a federal government that is not being open about its true intentions on the draft declaration.

"That's one of the critical things we've been asking for, some clarification of where the government actually does stan. Some rationale behind its objections and we haven't gotten that from them yet, although they did make the promise to."

He was asked if he also felt the government was overdue in responding.

"It's overdue in the sense that they've been objecting to the draft declaration for almost a decade and they've really never been forthcoming," he said. "The government, for its part, says that it has explained its position but to actually lay one's hands on it . . . [W]hen we got to ask questions of the negotiating team, we put the very specific question to them of whether Canada was prepared to commit that it would not take any position or advocate any position in relation to the declaration that would roll back the rights and protections Indigenous peoples already enjoy. You think it would be a very easy thing to answer, but we didn't get an answer."

A senior official at the Department of Foreign Affairs consented to speak on behalf of the government, but asked to not be named.

The source said the draft declaration was just a starting point for negotiations, that the "states hadn't approved it but the experts had" and Canada couldn't just accept the draft as written.

"Canada has consistently from the beginning said, 'Well, we'd like to, but we don't think we can.' Over the years, we've tried to explain why not. We've offered alternate language and in fact in 1996 we made a breakthrough move that was hailed as very positive thing by everybody at the time, to recognize that Indigenous peoples have a right to self-determination. The Canadian position has changed quite dramatically in many respects," the source said.

The government official said that at the last working group meeting, the states were on the verge of approving 12 or so articles but consensus couldn't be reached because some state representatives didn't have a mandate to agree on behalf of their country. Canada will apply pressure to all states in the working group to come to Geneva ready to ge