A/HRC/30/41/Add.1 settlements. Some 86.2 per cent of the 493 communities are incorporated and thus have legal capacity. 7. During the Spanish conquest and colonization of what is now Paraguay, beginning in the sixteenth century, the indigenous population was decimated, especially in the Eastern Region. Colonization of the Chaco inten sified in the nineteenth century. Following independence in 1811, successive authoritarian regimes adopted policies aimed at confiscating indigenous lands, thus depriving indigenous peoples of their rights to their lands and resources. In 1918, the Governm ent launched a policy to encourage foreign immigration by offering parcels of land. In the 1920s, Mennonite immigrants arrived and, assisted by legislation that gave them special rights and privileges, settled on indigenous lands, hiring their indigenous i nhabitants as labourers. 8. During the General Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954 -1989), large numbers of indigenous peoples were displaced from their lands and became victims of grave and systematic violations of their rights, including attacks by civi lians and the military against the Aché, Ayoreo, Maskoy and Toba Qom, extrajudicial killings and the abduction of indigenous children from their families, as documented by the Truth and Justice Commission in the work it carried out between 2003 and 2008 in an attempt to shed light on the crimes committed under the dictatorship. 2 According to the Commission, some of those same practices continued during the transition to democracy. 9. In the 1970s, indigenous peoples started to organize to defend their right s and interests at the regional and national levels and founded several indigenous organizations and groups. With the advent of democracy, Paraguay adopted a new Constitution in 1992 that recognizes the pre-existence and rights of indigenous peoples; existing legislative, administrative and public policy measures have not been sufficient to translate that recognition into action, however. III. Legal and institutional framework 10. Paraguay is a signatory to the core international human rights and environmental treaties. At the regional level, it has ratified the American Convention on Human Rights and has recognized the jurisdiction of the Inter -American Court of Human Rights. In 1993, Paraguay ratified the International Labour Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). 3 At the 2007 United Nations General Assembly, it voted in favour of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (“the Declaration”). 11. Chapter V of the 1992 Constitution of Paraguay, which deals with indigenous rights, was at the time of its writing one of the most progressive legal instruments in existence in terms of the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples. Article 62 recognizes the pre-existence of the indigenous peoples, defined as “groups from earlier cultures” at the time of the country’s founding. Article 63 recognizes and guarantees the right of indigenous peoples to preserve and nurture their ethnic identity, to follow their own political, social, economic, cultural and religious norms and to be bound of their own free will by their customary laws in internal matters. Other constitutional provisions recognize the right to communal land ownership (art. 64) and indigenous participation (art. 65) and establish special measures to protect indigenous __________________ 2 3 4/24 Truth and Justice Commission of Paraguay. Final report, vol. III, Conclusions and Recommendations, 2008. Paraguay had ratified the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, 1957 (No. 107) in 1968. GE.15-13734