CEDAW/C/81/D/68/2014 Court had endorsed a narrow interpretation of the Human Rights Act and left little recourse to First Nations women and their descendants, who lacked institutional power and funds for decades-long legal battles in defence of their rights; (b) Human Rights Watch, which noted that the Indian Act had been a primary instrument of the State party’s policy of colonization, which, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, had suppressed Aboriginal culture and languages, disrupted Aboriginal government, destroyed Aboriginal economies and confined Aboriginal people to marginal and often unproductive land s. While the gradual implementation of Bill S-3 had made significant improvements, including by restoring 6 (1) (a) status to the author, his children continued to be disqualified from receiving similar status because they did not meet the criterion that their parents must have married prior to 1985. Unlike their cousins, whose parents married prior to 1985, the author’s children could be granted status only under section 6 (2) – a cut-off rule arbitrarily based on the year of marriage – which effectively denied future generations of their families status under the Indian Act. The rule is discriminatory towards people of indigenous matrilineal descent whose parents were married after 1985. The State party’s piecemeal reforms to the Indian Act over the years had proved insufficient and left room for continued gender-based discrimination. Human Rights Watch also expressed its concerns about increasingly limited access to justice f or indigenous people seeking redress, especially in the light of the Supreme Court ruling of June 2018 that, because the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal could not overturn discriminatory laws, the Tribunal did not have the power to decide whether parts of the Indian Act were discriminatory. In the light of the length of time that the proceedings have been pending, the organization also pushed back against the State party’s claim that the author had not exhausted all domestic remedies; (c) Amnesty International, which submitted that the author was among tens of thousands of people in Canada who continued to be discriminated against, because of the ongoing failure of the State party to address fully the adverse effects of the historical gender inequality in the Indian Act, which represented a historical effort to forcibly assimilate indigenous peoples; (d) Assembly of First Nations, which submitted that Bill S-3 was adopted without adequate consultation with indigenous peoples, resulting in legislation that did not respect their fundamental rights; (e) British Columbia Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, which serves the needs of indigenous peoples displaced from their traditional lands and associated cultural practices because of exclusion owing to Indian status, and which submitted that the Indian Act remained a legislative tool that effectively assimilated indigenous peoples over time; (f) Native Women’s Association of Canada, which submitted that, in the light of the considerable hurdles that indigenous people, like the author, had regularly faced in gaining access to justice, it was not coincidental that, in its final report, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 14 called for the creation of a national indigenous and human rights ombudsperson and a related national indigenous and human rights tribunal; (g) Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, which submitted that the amendments of 2019 had failed to provide full remedy to indigenous women and their descendants affected by the historical and ongoing assimilative provisions of the Indian Act. Indeed, given the continuing imposition of a cut-off in the determination of status, the author’s children had become eligible for registration only under section 6 (2), unlike their cousins, who were eligible for registration under __________________ 14 22-03658 Available at www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/. 11/19