A/HRC/21/47 3. Consultation and consent in relation to the State duty to protect and the corporate responsibility to respect 62. As stated in paragraphs 47 to 53, principles of consultation and consent function to safeguard indigenous peoples’ rights when natural resource extraction may affect those rights, along with other safeguard mechanisms, including impact assessments, mitigation measures and compensation or benefit-sharing. The consultation and consent safeguard, just as the other safeguards, is part of the State duty to protect indigenous peoples’ rights in the context of extractive industries, which finds expression in article 32 (2) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the following terms: States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources. 63. The Special Rapporteur has devoted considerable attention to the duty of States to consult indigenous peoples in previous reports to the Human Rights Council, reports in which he identified the various international treaties and other sources (including the Declaration) grounding the duty to consult and in which he sought to clarify the justification, scope and minimum requirements of consultation procedures (see, for example, A/HRC/12/34; A/HRC/12/34/Add.6, paras. 15-41; and A/HRC/15/37, paras. 6070). 64. Given its character as a standard to safeguard indigenous peoples’ rights, the specific requirements of the duty to consult and the objective of obtaining consent, in any given situation in which extractive operations are proposed, are a function of the rights implicated and the potential impacts upon them. Accordingly, a focus on the rights implicated, as urged in paragraphs 49 and 50, is an indispensible starting point for devising appropriate consultation and consent procedures. The particular indigenous peoples or communities that are to be consulted are those that are the bearers of the potentially affected rights, the consultation procedures are to be devised to identify and address the potential impacts on the rights, and consent is to be sought for those impacts under terms that are protective and respectful of the rights. 65. As established by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples and other sources, where the rights implicated are essential to the survival of indigenous groups as distinct peoples and the foreseen impacts on the exercise of the rights are significant, indigenous consent to the impacts is required, beyond simply being an objective of consultations. 4 It is generally understood that indigenous peoples’ rights over lands and resources in accordance with customary tenure are necessary to their survival. Accordingly, indigenous consent is presumptively a requirement for those aspects of any extractive operation that takes place within the officially recognized or customary land use areas of indigenous peoples, or that has a direct bearing on areas of cultural significance, in particular sacred places, or on natural resources that are traditionally used by indigenous peoples in ways that are important to their survival. Even if consent is not strictly required, other safeguards apply and any impact that imposes a restriction on indigenous rights must, at a minimum, comply with standards of necessity and proportionality with regard to a valid public purpose, as 4 16 See Saramaka, paras. 134 and 137.