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.