European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Part 5 ppsx

Dispossession and international law peoples leading the life of hunter gatherers did not, according to Vattel, have a right to all of the land over which they roamed and might have considered to be their own. In a later chapter Vattel directly addresses the specific question of a nation establishing itself in another land. Like Locke before him, Vattel arguesthat the ‘earthbelongsto mankind ingeneral’, 67 but as population grew cultivation became necessary and from this came the ‘rights of propertyand dominion’. Theright that hadbeencommon to allmankind was then progressively ‘restricted to what each lawfully possesses’ as a result of cultivation. This in turn determines the meaning Vattel gives to whether or not a country was occupied. An unoccupied country is one that is not cultivated and in which the inhabitants are not united into a political society. All mankind have an equal right to things that have not yet fallen into the possession of any one; and those things belong to the person who first takes possession of them. When, therefore, a nation finds a country uninhabited, and without an owner, it may lawfully take possession of it: and after it has sufficiently made known its will in this respect, it cannot be deprived of it by another nation. Once again ‘the possession of anyone’ and ‘uninhabited’ meant settled and cultivated in the European manner.It tells us nothing about whether or not there actually were indigenous inhabitants. Indeed, throughout the expansion of Europe there must have been very few places on earth that were genuinely uninhabited. Nevertheless, Vattel continues by stating that when navigators took ‘possession’ of uninhabited lands in the name of their sovereign they established at the same time title which was respected ‘provided it was soon after followed by real possession’. 68 Real possession meant effec- tive occupation and his view was that the Law of Nations does ‘not acknowledge the property and sovereignty of a nation over any un- inhabited countries, except those of which it has really taken actual possession, in which it has formed settlements, or of which it makes ac- tual use’. 69 Once again uninhabited really meant that the lands claimed by navigators had not been occupied by Europeans, which is implicitly made clear by him in the section that follows. Vattel asks whether it is lawful for a nation to take possession ‘of some part of a vast country, in which there are none but erratic nations whose 67 Ibid., p. 97. 68 Ibid., para 207, p. 98. 69 Ibid., para 208, p. 99. 101 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples scanty population is incapable of occupying the whole’. 70 In answer to this he refers back to his earlier argument, in Paragraph 81, that nations were entitled only to land they need and were able to settle and culti- vate. ‘Their unsettled habitation in those immense regions cannot be ac- counted true and legal possession; and the people of Europe, too closely pent up at home, finding land of which the savages stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession of it, and settle it with colonies.’ The earth, he reiterates, belongs to mankind and if every nation had continued to live by hunting and gathering the earth would be unable to support ‘a tenth part’ of its population. From this he thought it followed that ‘confining the Indians within narrower limits’ was in keeping with the ‘views of nature’. 71 This was of course to ignore completely indigenous patterns of land use, belief, custom and law. Thus in the conclusion to The Rights of War and Peace Tuck comments that: The moral failure of the Europeans lay . . . in their indifference to the facts about North Americans – facts such as the actual prevalence of a form of agriculture among them (screened from view, often, by the circumstance that it was women who tilled the fields, and that their activity was promptly labelled gardening), the acute danger to the aboriginals posed by European diseases, and the inability of hunting societies to adapt to the loss of their hunting grounds. The attempt to save the lives of Europeans [by migrating to the New World to escape conditions in Europe] resulted in the mass slaughter of aboriginals on a scale far beyond even the great famines of the fourteenth century in Europe. 72 Writers who denied sovereign rights to non-Europeans In this category Lindley included John Westlake, William Edward Hall, Lasca Oppenheim 73 and T. J. Lawrence. All wrote in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, during or in recent memory of the extraordi- nary phase of expansion that began with the Scramble for Africa after 1885 and included the Scramble for Concessions in China. Gerrit Gong portrays this expansion as ‘fundamentally a confrontation of civilisa- tions and their respective cultural systems. At the heart of this clash were standards of civilisation by which these different civilisations identified 70 Ibid., para 209, p. 99. 71 Ibid., p. 100. 72 Tuck, Rights of War and Peace,p.233. 73 Lasca Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise, 8th ed. H. Lauterpacht (London: Longmans, 1967), vol. I. 102 Dispossession and international law themselves and regulated their international relations.’ A ‘standard of civilisation’ is, he explains, ‘an expression of the assumptions, tacit and explicit, used to distinguish those that belong to a particular society from those that do not’. 74 In the late nineteenth century, in particular, the European society of states espoused a standard of civilisation that ‘took an increasingly juridical character’. 75 The term ‘standard of civilisation’ was framed with reference to relations between European states and non-European peoples. It ‘demanded that foreigners receive treatment consistent “with the rule of law as understood in Western countries” ’. 76 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, according to him, a transition period between the expansion of the international system and the establishment of a ‘civilised’ international society. 77 Interna- tional law incorporating the standard of ‘civilisation’ had a crucial role in that process. At the same time as it ‘was by definition expanding to include all “civilised” nations, the countries qualified to come within its scope remained limited in practice’. 78 To enter the international society of ‘civilised’ states non-European entities had to meet the requirements of the standard set by European states. With the perspective of time we can recognise this as a form of cultural imperialism. In the work of Westlake and Hall the notion of ‘civilised’ and ‘semi- civilised’ states was fundamental to determining the scope of sovereign rights in international law. The legal rights and duties of states were based on the ‘legal capacity their degree of “civilisation” supposedly entitled them to possess’. 79 Westlake’s opinion was that the only ‘ter- ritorial titles recognised by International Law [were] those . . . held by states’ sufficiently well organised to be able to ‘protect the white set- tler in the pursuits of civilised life’. Hall regarded territory that had not been appropriated ‘ “by a civilised or semi-civilised state” [as] open to Occupation’. For Oppenheim, land occupied by indigenous peoples, but whose community could not be considered a state, was open to occu- pation; but ‘the territory of any State’, even one outside the ‘family of nations’, was not open and could be acquired only if it were freely ceded by its inhabitants or they were subjugated. Finally, Lawrence held that all territory that was ‘not in the possession of States [accepted as] members of the Family of Nations and subjects of International Law’ was territorium nullius. 80 74 Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’,p.3. 75 Ibid., p. 5. 76 Ibid., p. 14. 77 Ibid., p. 10. 78 Ibid., p. 59. 79 Ibid., p. 55. 80 Lindley, Acquisition and Government,p.18. 103 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples The problem with all of this was, as Lindley recognised in 1926, how the term ‘state’ should be understood and what it was that distinguished ‘savage from civilised peoples’. His answer was that ‘no accurate dis- tinction’ could be drawn between what was civilised and what was uncivilised and that the more sensible distinction to draw was that ‘between one kind of civilisation and another’, with the crucial deciding factor being whether there was evidence of political organisation. 81 The test of civilisation at the time was whether there was a sufficient degree of political organisation to allow European settlers to live in much the same degree of personal safety that they had enjoyed in their countries of origin. According to Westlake, this required a government able give Europeans the protection they needed to ‘carry on the complex life to which they have been accustomed in their homes, which may prevent that life from being disturbed by contests between different European powers for supremacy on the same soil, and which may protect the na- tives in the enjoyment of a security and well-being at least not less than that they enjoyed before the arrival of strangers’. 82 If ‘the natives’ could not provide a government equal to this task then they were to be re- garded for the purposes of international law as ‘uncivilised’. Territory that did have political society was not open to occupation, but tracts of land ‘inhabited only by isolated individuals who were not united for political action’ could be considered territorium nullius and open to occupation. 83 The Collected Papers of John Westlake illustrate very well the impor- tance, at the time, of this distinction between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘uncivilised’ for the status of non-Europeans in international law. He is, for that reason alone, worth considering at length. Among the top- ics he identified as bearing on the status of non-Europeans in relation to the dichotomy between the civilised and uncivilised are territorial sovereignty; the position of uncivilised nations with regard to interna- tional law; government and the international test of civilisation; treaties with uncivilised tribes; and discovery and occupation as titles. Taking these in turn, the question Westlake asks about territorial sovereignty concerns native title. It is whether, once a ‘civilised’ state turns a country into a colony, the title to the land continues accord- ing to the customs of the inhabitants before civilised government was established. What concerns him, in particular, is the situation where a 81 Ibid., p. 22. 82 Westlake, Collected Papers,p.143. 83 Lindley, Acquisition and Government, pp. 23, 47. 104 Dispossession and international law colony is ‘formed among natives of some advancement’. In his view it was up to the coloniser to either accept or reject native custom and law. The title to land was regarded as issuing from a grant by the colonising state, the authority of which derived from territorial sovereignty. Con- sequently, it was open to colonisers to dispossess the ‘less advanced’ or ‘uncivilised’. Acquiring sovereignty meant the colonising state acquired all land that ‘it was not morally compelled to acknowledge as belong- ing to natives’ or to European pioneers who occupied territory before the establishment of state sovereignty. Essentially property was viewed as issuing from sovereignty but that raised the question of the origin of sovereignty itself. What, Westlake asked, allowed the conclusion that ‘an uncivilised region may be internationally recognised as appropriated in sovereignty to a particular state?’ 84 Only, he answered, ‘recognition of such sovereignty by the members of international society’. Whether the sovereignty claimed by the colonizing state was recognised by the in- habitants was irrelevant because international law took no account of ‘uncivilised’ natives. But this didn’t mean that all rights they might have were denied. Whether they were recognised was a matter for the con- science of the state into which they had been incorporated: ‘the rules of international society existing only for the purpose of regulating the mutual conduct of its members’. 85 Two important implications of this were, first, that the establishment of a colony meant the inhabitants prior to colonisation were now con- tained within a state. They henceforth had, as a result of the logic of international law, no international personality and no sovereign rights other than as citizens of the states which now exercised sovereignty over them. Second, the idea that it was up to the colonising state to determine title brings us back to the question of the moral basis of the state and of international society. States might do dreadful things to ‘uncivilised’ people, such as take away their land, but as long as it did not transgress the norms of behaviour with fellow members of international society, it was of no concern to international law. Protecting the rights of a non- European society against a European state would, in all likelihood, have required the intercession of one or more other European states. Such ac- tion could have resulted in the kind of conflict between European states that the Berlin Conference of 1885 sought to avoid and it would have undercut the colonizing activities of all European states. 84 Westlake, Collected Papers, p. 137. 85 Ibid., p. 138. 105 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Westlake begins his discussion of the position of ‘uncivilised’ nations in international law with an argument against natural law. It is that a theorist who entertains the idea of a ‘state of nature independent of human institutions cannot introduce into his picture a difference be- tween civilised and uncivilised man’. Westlake’s theory is that certain institutions determine whether people are civilised or uncivilised, rather than abstract laws of nature such as those Vitoria had relied upon to draw the conclusion that there is a fundamental equality between all humankind. In what is obviously a reference to Vattel, Westlake asserts that when an ‘uncivilised’ people occupied more land than they needed, their presence was not a barrier to ‘civilised’ people occupying it as if it were terra nullius.Insupport of this he suggests that Vitoria was not questioning the title of Spain but instead wanted to influence its actions towards Indians. 86 If it was a matter of rights and making rights the start- ing point for law with rights regarded as common to both ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised humanity’, then this was not something for international law to ‘develop and protect’. The Berlin Conference, convened to lay down the ground rules for European expansion into Africa, had not en- dorsed the idea that ‘an uncivilised population has rights which make its consent necessary to the establishment of a government possessing international validity’. 87 In other words, ‘uncivilised’ populations had no rights against states accepted as members of international society. On balance, states were not well advised, if they wished to preserve har- mony in their relations with one another, to question too closely how the one or the other actually had come to acquire the territory of ‘uncivilised’ people. This was not to deny the rights of those that were not party to agreements; but they were moral and not legal rights. ‘The moral rights of all outside the international society against the several members of that society remain intact, though they have not and scarcely could have been converted into legal rights.’ 88 The test of civilisation articulated by Westlake was that of most if not all publicists of his time. Civilisation had nothing to do with the per- sonal or cultural attributes of non-Europeans but instead with whether they could provide a level of government that would allow European settlers to live with the level of personal safety that they would enjoy in their home country. 89 This did not necessarily require the degree of government found in Europe. ‘If even the natives could furnish such a government after the manner of the Asiatic empires, that would be 86 Ibid., p. 139. 87 Ibid., p. 141. 88 Ibid., p. 142. 89 Ibid., p. 143. 106 Dispossession and international law sufficient.’ 90 But if natives could not provide such government then it was legitimate for Europeans or ‘civilised’ peoples to impose it on them. In support of this Westlake rehearses the standard imperialist arguments of the time concerning progress and European duty. Regardless of that, he impishly argued, if the ‘uncivilised’ wanted to keep Europeans out of their lands they would have to have a government to do it. 91 In the course of discussing the status of treaties with ‘uncivilised tribes’ Westlake defends European acquisition on the grounds that hunt- ing and nomadic tribes ‘may have so slight a connection with any land in particular as to share but little, if at all, the ideas which we connect with property and the soil’. 92 This harks back to the earlier discussion of Vattel and simply ignores the beliefs and laws that native inhabi- tants might have had concerning their relationship with the land. It is in effect to claim the superiority of European ideas of property and on that basis justify the dispossession of hunting and nomadic tribes. At the same time Westlake discounts the importance of treaties by saying that it is not so much treaties with first nations that count as whether or not they have the capacity for government. It is noteworthy that Westlake explicitly excludes Mexico and Peru from his discussion be- cause, when Europeans arrived, they were countries that ‘had attained a degree of advancement ranking them rather as states than as uncivilised tribes’. 93 Finally, in a section on discovery and occupation as a source of title, Westlake makes it quite clear that international law is concerned with titles to territory that ‘states belonging to the society of international law are able to invoke against one another’. The ‘uncivilised’ inhabitants of the territory concerned were simply denied title. From the perspective of the late twentieth century the idea that international law recognised only the claims of members of international society against each other is troubling. Fortunately it belongs to a phase of international law that has long been left behind. The eclipse of natural law The preceding versions of sovereign rights demonstrate that the ear- lier writers were more willing to concede rights to non-Europeans. 94 As the expansion of Europe proceeded international law became 90 Ibid., p. 144. 91 Ibid., p. 145. 92 Ibid., p. 142. 93 Ibid., p. 149. 94 Crawford, The Creation of States,p.175. 107 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples simultaneously more universal and exclusionary. It aspired to universal application but, as we have seen, excluded ‘primitive societies’ from its community. Gong argues that this tension was the source of the first of two crises that challenged the development of international law. The first derived precisely ‘from the contradiction inherent within the law’s universal aspirations and its requirements that only “civilised” coun- tries could fully be its subjects’. The second came much later when the ‘newly independent non-European countries sought to use their new membership in the United Nations and other international bodies to modify the international law which they had earlier perceived to be both foreign and disciplinary’. 95 The retraction of sovereign rights of non-Europeans regarded by Europeans as ‘uncivilised’, which was the source of the first of these two crises, was partly a result of the gradual eclipse of natural law as international law evolved into the positive law of relations between states. Las Casas, Sepulveda and Vitoria with whom we began, worked from the precepts of natural law in which the rights and duty of all humankind were paramount; the law of nations had no important role in their argu- ment. Grotius also worked from the precepts of natural law, but by the time he wrote states had begun to loom larger and with them the need for a law of nations. According to him both the law of nature and the less specific concept jus gentium or law of nations encompassed more than simply Europe and Christendom. By jus gentium he ‘meant the partic- ular positive law which, with the consent of nations, supplements the law of nature and which together with it regulates the totality of in- ternational relations’. 96 Jus gentium included natural law and because the latter concerned all humans, everywhere, it supposedly had univer- sal application. Unlike the laws of each state that were to do with the interests of that state the Law of Nations represented certain laws that originated ‘between all states, or a great many states; and had in view the advantage, not of particular states, but of the great society of states’. It was an expression of common consent. 97 Thus Cutler asserts that ‘[t]he most profound component of the Grotian world view is the assumption that there is a universal standard of justice and morality against which the actions of states may be judged’. 98 It is a universal standard grounded 95 Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’,p.243. 96 Peter Remec, The Position of the Individual in International Law According to Grotius and Vattel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), p. 28. 97 Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, see the Prolegomena 17 and Para 40. 98 Cutler, ‘Grotian Tradition’, p. 46. 108 Dispossession and international law in natural law and the work of Grotius supports the view ‘that individ- uals, alongside states, hold rights, and owe duties under international law’. As previously mentioned, Grotius’ writings reflect ‘the absence at the time of a clearly perceived distinction between individual and state personality’. 99 Indeed, in his theoretical framework states derived their rights from individuals; the one had the rights of the other. Remec contends that the conception of international law as a positive law of nations supplementing the law of nature obscures the fact that Grotius had a very different idea of the law of nature from that of the so- called Grotians with whom Vattel is usually identified. He defends this proposition by first drawing a trifold distinction between ‘naturalists’, ‘positivists’ and then ‘Grotians’ who combined the first two. Naturalists are writers on international law who, like Hobbes, regard nations as existing in a state of nature, which leads them to ‘equate the law of nations with the law of nature’ and ‘more or less deny the existence of a separate law of nations’. 100 In this sense Vattel’s conception of the law of nature followed that of Hobbes. That states existed in a state of nature implied that relations between them were governed by the law of nature. In Vattel’s construction of international law states are collections of men who, in a state of nature, are free, independent and governed by the law of nature. Because states are nothing more than collections of men they also are free, independent and in a state of nature. The law of nations therefore equates with the law of nature. 101 Vattel’s conception of the law of nature, according to Remec’s reading of it, is then individualistic and to do with self-preservation rather than the classical ideal upheld by Grotius that ‘the primary bond between men is their common rational and social nature’. Earlier discussion, in this chapter and in chapter 2, of Tuck’s work on Grotius, Hobbes and Vattel shows that this is not correct. Not only was self-preservation a cardinal natural right in Grotius’ theory, on the ques- tion of sociability there was little to chose between Hobbes and Grotius. If Tuck’s understanding is correct, and I believe it is, Vattel’s Law of Nations was a defence of Grotius’ conception of it. In Book II of the Law of Nations,Vattel did, however, move away from Grotius’s inclusion of individuals via natural law towards establishing states as the exclusive subjects of international law. It is here that he articulates the idea that the paramount duty of a nation towards itself ‘is its preservation and 99 Ibid. 100 Remec, Position of the Individual,p.53. 101 Julius Stone, Approaches to the Notion of International Justice (Jerusalem: Truman Center Publications No. 4, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1970), pp. 41–2. 109 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples perfection, together with that of its state’. 102 He then elaborates on the duties of states towards other states. States have a duty not only to help preserve other states, 103 but also to contribute to the perfection of other states. Perfection he defines in terms of whether a state ‘is more or less adapted to attain the end of civil society’. Helping other nations obtain perfection does not, however, include doing so by force, which would be a violation of the ‘natural liberty’ of others. Nations are ‘free and independent’ and not to be interfered with by other nations and in re- lation to this he criticizes both the Conquest of America and Grotius. In an unmistakable reference to the Spaniards he says that the Europeans who attacked the American nations, ‘and subjected them to their greedy dominion’, in order to civilise them and instruct them in the ‘true reli- gion’ were ‘usurpers unjust and ridiculous’. Grotius, he says, was mistaken in defending the use of force to prevent ‘transgressions of the law of nature’ such as cannibalism. The use of force was permissible only by those whose safety was at risk. Grotius’ position was one that would give vent to ‘the ravages of enthusiasm and fanaticism’ in numerous ways. 104 Vattel’s system of international law is one in which individual human beings are excluded as direct subjects of international law. People can only assert rights against the state and are therefore cut off from ap- peal to international society. Remec argues that although ‘the individual man serves as the basis for Vattel’s constructions of the society of states – The humanitarian concept of a great republic of all men [actually] serves as a disguise for the establishment of the concept of a society of nations which excludes from its ranks everything and everybody but sovereign states.’ 105 Ultimately he provides the conceptual basis of an ‘exclusive society of states, with no place left for the individual’. 106 Remec con- cludes that ‘Grotius recognises but Vattel denies the possibility of inter- national protection of human rights against one’s own state.’ 107 The nineteenth century, which formed the views of people like Hall, Westlake and Lindley, was when natural law finally gave way to positive international law. Charles Alexandrowicz argues that as a consequence ‘[i]nternational law shrank into an Eurocentric system which imposed on extra-European countries its own ideas including the admissibil- ity of war and non-military pressure as a prerogative of sovereignty. It also discriminated against non-European civilisations and thus ran on 102 Vattel, Law of Nations, Para 14, p. 135. 103 Ibid., Para 4. 104 Ibid., pp. 136–7. 105 Remec, Position of the Individual,p.19. 106 Ibid., p. 220. 107 Ibid., p. 243. 110 [...]... significance for indigenous rights is the right of all peoples to self-determination, proclaimed in Article 1 of both the ICCPR and the ICESCR, and Article 27 of the ICCPR, which provides for the right of minorities ‘to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language’.6 Indigenous peoples ‘see their status as other than minorities in their own land’ and should... protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples; and To develop international standards concerning the rights of indigenous peoples, taking account of the similarities and the differences in their situations and aspirations throughout the world.20 17 United Nations Of ce of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Fact Sheet No 9, p 4 18 Venne, Our Elders, p 151 19 Sarah... WGIP, the establishment of the Permanent Forum, and preparation of the Draft Declaration It has facilitated and given legitimacy to the need for indigenous rights The inclusion of indigenous peoples as participants in organs reporting to the Commission on Human Rights and ECOSOC, and through them the General Assembly, coupled with development of the Draft Declaration within the framework of the international... Land and culture Land is a crucial element in the recovery and continuation of indigenous ways of life As Taiaiake Alfred puts it: ‘Land, culture, and government are inseparable in traditional philosophies; each depends on the others, and this means that denial of one aspect precludes recovery of the whole.’ 35 For many indigenous peoples the dispossession of their land, as a result of the arrival of European. .. body standing above them At the top of the structure is the General Assembly Descending from it are the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (Sub-Commission) and the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) With the exception of the WGIP each of these has oversight of groups charged with particular... Nations’, p 3 22 119 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples At the second session of the CHR Working Group there was much less debate on definition, and indigenous access and participation emerged as critical issues Unresolved were the questions of whether state delegations would accept the consensual working methods that had made the WGIP a success, and whether indigenous peoples would insist... Calder and Delgamuukw see also Tully, ‘Stuggles of Indigenous Peoples , in Ivison, Patton and Sanders (eds.), Political Theory, pp 44 50 45 Brennan, One Land, One Nation, p 138 1 25 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples a ‘collective identity’, that is the nucleus of ‘a competing nationalism within the state’.46 Self-determination For indigenous peoples self-determination is a means to the. .. Westlake, Collected Papers, p 103 111 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples otherness The parallels between the nineteenth-century notion of the other as fundamentally primitive and the criteria of the standard of civilisation for excluding particular peoples from consideration under international law are obvious It would be surprising if the development of legal reasoning at any given juncture... during the United Nations International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (19 95 2004) Two central goals for the decade were the establishment of a Permanent United Nations Forum for Indigenous Peoples and the adoption, by the General Assembly, of a declaration on indigenous rights The first of these goals was realised in 2000, but in 2003 the second has yet to be achieved In the recovery of indigenous. .. only by these states’.110 The defence of the rights of non-Europeans by earlier writers was grounded in natural law which did not draw any clear distinction between individual and state personality The positivist view of the late nineteenth century was that the acquisition of territory was a matter of the rights of European states against each other; the rights of nonEuropeans were over-ridden if their . Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples otherness. The parallels between the nineteenth-century notion of the other as fundamentally primitive and the criteria of the standard of civilisation. Group have been the definition of indigenous peoples and their participation. A lot of the politics of the decade has been taken up with the question of definition. At the first session of the CHR Working. 1. 117 European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples According to the Of ce of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as many as 700 people comprising observers for governments and indigenous