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Cultural Diversity, Legal Pluralism, and Human Rights from an Indigenous Perspective: The Approach by the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hrq.2014.0056

1085-794X

Felipe Gómez Isa,

Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law

The increasing cultural diversity and legal pluralism prevailing in the global south should not always be seen as a threat to a universal concept of human rights, but as an enriching input for it. The progressive recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights in the last decades is forging, sometimes with difficulties, a more open and dynamic conception of human rights. By opening the door to the indigenous conceptions of law, justice, and dignity, both the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are decisively contributing with their progressive * Felipe Gomez Isa is Professor of Public International Law and senior researcher at the Pedro Arrupe Institute of Human Rights of the University of Deusto (Bilbao, The Basque Country, spain). He is National Director of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratization, EMA (European Inter-University Center for Human Rights and Democratization, EIUC, Venice, Italy). Currently, he is a Visiting Professor at Fordham Law school, New York. This article is part of a research project conducted in Colombia and Mexico between 2010 and 2012 to explore the consistency of indigenous world views vis-a-vis International Human Rights Law. The author wants to thank the researchers at the University of Deusto (spain), at Ibero-American University (Mexico) and at Javeriana University of Cali (Colombia) for their support and valuable comments on earlier drafts. I also would like to acknowledge the challenging criticisms and suggestions made by indigenous leaders of the Nasa people at the Cauca Valley in Colombia. They were the main source of inspiration for the completion of this article. This essay was submitted at an international workshop on “Legal Pluralism and Human Rights” organized by the Center for Human Rights of the University of Ghent (Belgium) on May 2013 at the Onati International Institute for the sociology of Law (Onati, The Basque Country, spain). I am very grateful for the very insightful comments made by Eva Brems, Giselle Corradi, Andre Hoekema, Ellen Desmet, and Mark Goodale, among many other participants. Email: felipe.gomez@deusto.es. 2014 Indigenous Perspectives on Human Rights 723 jurisprudence to an increasingly more multicultural approach to human rights. The culmination of this complex and somewhat contradictory process took place with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in september 2007, a clear example of an attempt to balance indigenous conceptions of dignity with the very basics of international human rights law. The aim of this work is to analyze how the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights conceive the problematic but also challenging relationship between indigenous legal pluralism and the protection and promotion of human dignity. The so-called multicultural jurisprudence is paving the way for a more inclusive conception of human rights, a conception enriched by local ways of framing and understanding human dignity.