In the dying days of the Howard Government the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. John Howard personally intervened to convince the new Canadian government to join the US, New Zealand and Australia as the only governments to register outright opposition to the adoption of the declaration.
The Rudd Government is presently engaged in consultations before announcing its final decision whether to register an affirmative vote for the declaration.
The declaration is not a treaty or international covenant. It does not require nation states to be signatories. It does not become part of the domestic law of any country voting for its adoption, carry with it any conditions requiring supportive governments to report periodically on compliance, or permit supportive governments to report violations by other governments.
It is a largely symbolic document expressing the finest aspirations of and for indigenous peoples.
We are now marking the 60th anniversary of the finest aspirational declaration of rights ever made by the UN General Assembly — the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was backed up two decades later with covenants on civil and political rights and on economic and social rights.
Last month, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney published an evocative tribute to that declaration. He wrote in The Irish Times that 'the Declaration has succeeded in creating an international moral consensus. It is always there as a means of highlighting abuse if not always as a remedy: it exists instead in the moral imagination as an equivalent of the gold standard in the monetary system ...
'Even if its Articles are ignored or flouted — in many cases by governments who have signed up to them — it provides a worldwide amplification system for the 'still, small voice'.'
Opponents of the indigenous declaration point out that it differs markedly from the 1948 universal declaration. The indigenous declaration was worked on primarily by indigenous groups and not by national governments. Its strength and its weakness is that it lists the aspirations of politically active indigenous groups and not necessarily the aspirations of governments of nation states.
It applies to indigenous peoples only but does not define who indigenous peoples are. And it places heavy emphasis on self-determination, a politically evocative but legally undefined term.
A more tightly worded declaration would have done more to forge a moral consensus and to highlight