Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 08/2008

Accommodating Indigenous Peoples within the Human Rights Regime:The Case of Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua

Amy E. Eckert

June 2007

Human Rights & Human Welfare (University of Denver)

Abstract

Some critics allege that the human rights regime is based upon the values of liberal individualism and therefore inappropriate for communities that do not share a commitment to these values (Pollis and Schwab 1979). Such critics characterize human rights as being either irrelevant because of the lack of fit between liberal individualism and more community-based cultures or, even worse, as an imperialist tool in the hands of the West. However, the individual rights that are secured by the international human rights regime can be used for a variety of different purposes, including both liberal and non-liberal ends. A person, or a group of persons, may use the individual freedoms secured by international human rights treaties to express opinions that are entirely inconsistent with, or even in certain respects contrary to, liberal political ideals. To restrict the rights of this individual to the expression of liberal ideals would be, ultimately, inconsistent with the idea of freedom underlying these rights. Because liberalism values the autonomy of the individual (and, arguably, the autonomy of the community) above that individual’s willingness to embrace any particular ideas, a liberal approach to human rights enables individuals and communities to utilize their rights and freedoms in a broad manner of ways. Recent progress in the area of indigenous rights underscores the extent to which the rights secured by the international human rights regime, though expressed in liberal individualistic terms, can nevertheless be used to secure non-liberal communitarian goals....