A/79/160
Article 10 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and
article 16 (2) of ILO Convention No. 169 protect against forced removal and
relocation without free prior and informed consent. Unrecognized or precarious land
rights increase vulnerability to unlawful evictions and restrictions on mobility. Even
where laws exist to protect against evictions, 53 safeguards are superseded by
competing claims, as land tenure security is often embedded in sedentarist or
agrarian-industrial ideals. 59
31. Indigenous Peoples who are mobile often struggle to have their communal land,
territory and resource rights recognized, as their mobility is frequently overlooked by
States when demarcating and titling lands or designing land management plans.
When judicial remedies are available, the process is often too costly for mobile
Indigenous Peoples to pursue legal action. 60 Compounding the high costs, courts have
“individualized” remediation of collectively owned lands comprising shared resources
by mobile Indigenous Peoples, because laws protect individual rights over mobile based livelihoods. 61
32. While mobile Indigenous Peoples’ land and resource rights are largely ignored,
there are several examples of State recognition, including pastureland laws in
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; 62 the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest
Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act in India, of 2006; the Village Land Act,
of 1999, and the Grazing-land and Animal Feed Resources Act, of 2010, in the United
Republic of Tanzania; the Constitution of Ethiopia, of 1994, and Proclamation
31/1975; 63 and the Land Act (Cap. 227) of Uganda, of 1998. 64 National pastoral codes
in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and the Niger serve to support and regulate
pastoralism. 65 In Kenya, the Community Land Act of 2016, National Land Policy of
2009 and the Constitution of 2010 address land tenure security and the right to own
and manage land communally. 66 State recognition of mobile Indigenous Peoples’ land
rights is essential; however, laws are often disregarded by the government and
communities are unable to assert them.
33. In section 9 of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of
Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security of the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), of 2022, States are
urged to recognize and protect Indigenous customary land tenure and to meet their
obligations under ILO Convention No. 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 67
34. The International Land Coalition has developed a toolkit for pastoralists and
other mobile Indigenous Peoples 68 that identifies good practices, such as agreements
between pasture user groups and local governments over pasturelands for herders in
Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. 69
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63
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International Land Coalition submission.
Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization submission.
Ringo W. Tenga, “The right to food and security of pastoral resource rights in the United
Republic of Tanzania”, in The Right to Food and Access to Natural Resources: Using Human
Rights Arguments and Mechanisms to Improve Resource Access for the Rural Poor , Lorenzo
Catula, ed. (Rome, FAO, 2009), p. 51.
International Land Coalition submission.
Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization submission.
World Pastoralist Forum submission.
International Land Coalition submission.
Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization submission.
FAO, Voluntary Guideline on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and
Forests in the Context of National Food Security (Rome, 2022).
International Land Coalition, “ILC toolkit 3: diverse tenure systems”, 2019.
International Land Coalition submission.
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