Fundació pels Drets Collectius dels Pobles President, distinguished participants, my name is [inaudible] and I am the president of the Fundació pels Drets Collectius dels Pobles, a Catalan foundation dedicated to promoting knowledge and recognition of the collective rights of peoples, and to advancing the effective implementation through action in the fields of language, culture, and international cooperation. Our purpose at this Forum is to call for the United Nations to recognize stateless nations and the collective rights of peoples as an essential pathway to ensuring peaceful and democratic processes. We understand stateless nations as communities who identify and recognize themselves as a people, yet lack an official state of their own and the institutional tools necessary to guarantee their collective rights. In contexts marked by tension or violence, these stateless nations are often denied recognition as collective actors. As a consequence, their voice is silenced and their legitimate aspirations remain unheard. While the United Nations formally recognizes the right to self-determination, in practice this recognition is mostly limited to territories considered colonies or geographically distant from the metropolitan state. Other peoples, such as the Catalan nation, are not recognized as a political subject despite fulfilling the criteria of a distinct people with collective rights. For all these reasons, we recommend: incorporating the recognition of the collective rights of peoples, in addition to individual human rights, and explicitly including languages, cultures, and minoritized peoples within the framework of collective rights. Thank you very much.

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