MULTILATERAL TRADE
Indigenous Peoples and Multilateral Trade
Regimes:
Navigating New Opportunities for Advocacy
Russel Barsh
New York University School of Law
Conference Organizer/Moderator: Russel Barsh
May 17-19, 2002
The conference was timed to coincide with the first session of the
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (May 13-24, 2002)
and, like the Forum, aimed to broaden Indigenous advocacy from its
narrow focus on human rights complaints against States, to a more
proactive economic agenda. Multilateral trade regimes (MTOs) such as
NAFTA and World Trade Organization have been criticized by Indigenous
organizations as new and more powerful instruments of domination.
Indigenous peoples have learned to make effective uses of national
courts and the United Nations, however, although these institutions
were also created by nation-states to serve states interests. In what
ways and to what extent can Indigenous peoples use MTOs to combat
discrimination and economic marginalization? We conceived of gathering
a small, informal group of experienced and creative lawyers, scholars,
and Indigenous leaders to workshop this question, and agree on some
practical ways of bringing more lawyers and leaders into the
discussion.
Participants included both faculty and students from New York
University School of Law, the Law School and Centre for International
Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia and the
Indigenous Law Journal at the University of Toronto, as well as
economists and legal scholars from the Harvard Business School, the
Estey Centre for Law and Economics in International Trade, and the
International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management (IIIRM). We
were also privileged to have guests from the Interior Alliance of
British Columbia First Nations, the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation, and the
Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nation Chiefs, joined on the last
day by the coordinators of the Andean Indian lawyers network CAPAJ,
and the Ethnic Minority and Indigenous Rights Organization of Africa. |