Access to justice and wider developments Sample Clauses

Access to justice and wider developments. In several settler states, policies or laws have been adopted in response to indigenous peoples’ cultural property claims that follow an approach in line with the UNDRIP. The United States took a pioneering step in this regard with the adoption of NAGPRA, introducing the ‘cultural affiliation’ prong to allocate rights to (indigenous) cultural objects on the basis of (1) a shared group ident- ity and (2) the (continued) existence of an identifiable indigenous group for 152 General Comment No 21 (n. 134). 153 Lenzerini (2017) 343; W xxx Xxxxxxxx and X Xxxxxxxxx, ‘Legal Implementation and Inter- national Cooperation and Assistance: Articles 37-42’ in X. Xxxxxxx and X. Xxxxxx (eds) The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Commentary (2018) Oxford University Press. 154 And the fact these claims are seen as merely ‘moral.’ E.g., see the reference to the UNDRIP as non-binding in the German Museum Association, Guidelines on Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts (n. 110) 70-71. 155 If the UNDRIP could be viewed as a first step toward a binding instrument. See Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (adopted 23 May 1969) 1155 UNTS 331 art 18. 156 Study by the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on the ‘Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with Respect to Their Cultural Heritage’ (2015) UN Doc A/HRC/30/53 (Study by the Expert Mechanism) 72. property claims.157 Where NAGPRA is effective only within the domestic US territory and applies to federal institutions, other settler states have adopted policies to pursue repatriation claims of objects containing human remains on behalf of their indigenous peoples from abroad.158 A 2019 draft Canadian bill on the subject, the Indigenous Human Remains and Cultural Property Act, planned to take things one step further. It promotes the return of indigenous human remains as well as cultural property, wherever situated, to the indigenous peoples of Canada.159 If this Bill would become law in the future, it would implicate that Canadian authorities will actively pursue the international repatriation of indigenous Canadian cultural objects. The fact that a human rights law approach is not restricted to indigenous peoples’ cultural property claims may be illustrated furthermore by China, which publicly invoked in April 2018 the ‘cultural rights of the Chinese people’ in a claim to artefacts seized from the Old Summer Palace in the nineteenth century that were on aucti...