Indigenous Water Rights in Comparative Law

Treating Water: Engineering and the Denial of Indigenous Water Rights

In 2011, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada released the National Assessment of First Nations Water and Wastewater Systems as prepared by Neegan Burnside Ltd. This assessment has been largely used by government, media, and Indigenous groups to point to the decrepit state of water and wastewater systems on First Nations reserves across the country, and to advanc...

Indigenous Law and Gender in South Africa: Taking Human Rights and Cultural Diversity Seriously

Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Culture and Individual Rights to Access

Using the methods of philosophical analysis and concepts from moral and political philosophy Indigenous Peoples’ human right to control access to their cultural information is defended. The concept of a “right” is delineated and different types of rights are differentiated. The method of an “overlapping consensus” is used. In attempting to articulate the moral foundation for Indigenous Peoples’...

Balancing Rights or Building Rights? Reconciling the Right to Use Customary Systems of Law with Competing Human Rights in Pursuit of Indigenous Sovereignty

In 2007, after more than 20 years of exhaustive negotiations, drafts and re-drafts between indigenous groups and member states, the United Nations (“UN”) finally adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (“Declaration”) by an overwhelming majority.2 The UN thereby recognized the right of indigenous peoples “to promote, develop and maintain their . . . distinctive customs, spir...

Unpacking rights in indigenous African societies: indigenous culture and the question of sexual and reproductive rights in Africa

BACKGROUND Modern declarations on human rights have often proceeded without reference to the cultural content of rights, the existence of rights in African indigenous backgrounds, and the embodiment of certain key rights in the community itself. This paper is an attempt at developing an 'inventory' of rights in African cultures as a prelude to the generation both of a holistic theory of rights ...