November 27, 2013

Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Workshop Produces Report for The Hague

On 25 November 2013, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Workshop finalized its research report on the plight of the Mapuche people in Chile, The Mapuche Struggle for Recognition and Land: A Legal Analysis.  The report is the result of collaboration between the law school and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation in The Hague, under which UNPO suggests an unrepresented state or an indigenous group whose situation is ripe for legal investigation and analysis and a group of students within the law school researches and writes a report on the relevant legal issues.

On 25 November 2013, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Workshop finalized its research report on the plight of the Mapuche people in Chile, The Mapuche Struggle for Recognition and Land: A Legal Analysis.  The report is the result of collaboration between the law school and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation in The Hague, under which UNPO suggests an unrepresented state or an indigenous group whose situation is ripe for legal investigation and analysis and a group of students within the law school researches and writes a report on the relevant legal issues.

The year’s workshop, with only three students, selected for investigation the Mapuche people of Chile.  Their report, involving analysis and application of the ILO Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the American Convention on Human Rights, concludes that the root of the Mapuche’s many difficulties in Chile is that state’s failure to apply international standards in relation to ancestral land and the related absence in Chile of constitutional recognition of the Mapuche.

Professor John Grant, who led the Workshop, said: “This is an amazing report from a very small number of students.  A study of this magnitude needs two to three times the number of investigators we had.  Yet these three, Susan Culliney, Marisa Peterson and Ian Royer, have produced an outstanding report that will be of great help to UNPO – and have done so in 12 weeks.”

The report has been sent to UNPO, which will use it as part of its research and advocacy work, and, as a matter of courtesy, to the Mapuche Inter-Regional Council.