For the past 34 years, the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) has advocated for strengthening the solidarity, cooperation, and capacities of Indigenous Peoples in Asia to promote and protect their rights, cultures, and identities, as well as their sustainable resource management systems for their development and self-determination. AIPP established the Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Defenders (IPHRDs) Network in 2010 to strengthen a resilient and united network of grassroots Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights Defenders across Asia that promotes and protects human rights and addresses the root causes of violations.
Indigenous human rights defenders and their communities in Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia face land dispossession, militarization, and the construction of harmful transmission lines and hydropower projects–all actions that threaten their rights to self-determination and territorial sovereignty. AIPP helps these communities facilitate legal action, policy reforms, and protection mechanisms through its Center of Defenders program, which is made up of 500 individual members and 9 member countries, and the creation of a regional and human rights violations database on Indigenous Peoples. In the spirit of recognizing self-determination, the database will be governed by Indigenous People through a secure, decentralized, and rights-based framework.
The framework takes into account community ownership and consent (i.e. free, prior, and informed consent); establishes an Indigenous-led ethics board to review Artificial Intelligence usage and prevent bias; and sets up mechanisms for alerts and emergency data erasure options to ensure the protection of at-risk defenders and communities. The database will be housed on a prototype website and is sure to be a valuable resource to document and analyze human rights violations.