A/HRC/15/37/Add.4 12. Also recently, the Government endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly on 13 September 2007. Reversing the earlier position of Australia on the Declaration, on 3 April 2009, the Minister responsible for indigenous affairs issued a public statement pledging Government support for the Declaration and expressing the commitment of the Government to redefining and improving Australia’s relationship with indigenous peoples. The Government’s support for the Declaration supplements the commitment of Australia to human rights in relation to various international instruments, including most of the core United Nations human rights treaties, which have been ratified by Australia. 13. The Government’s abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2005 has been the subject of repeated concern expressed to the Special Rapporteur. Recently, the Government has taken important steps to support a new national representative body, the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, which is expected to be established and fully operational by January 2011. 14. Indigenous peoples have called for reforms to deliver constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, provide guarantees of non-discrimination and protect their rights in a charter of rights to be included in the Constitution or other legislation. The Government has, in principle, recognized the need for such reforms, although it has stressed the complexity of enacting them. Hence, advances in this regard have been slow or non-existent. However, the Government has reported that the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples will play a key role in advancing constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 15. The Government has in place a number of programmes and policy statements aimed at benefiting indigenous peoples, which it describes as being in accordance with its intention to “reset” the relationship with them. The Government’s major programmatic initiative toward indigenous peoples is in its “Closing the Gap” campaign, which is aimed at reducing the significant disadvantages faced by indigenous peoples in socio-economic spheres. It is not possible to detail each of the government programmes in this report, however, components of the Closing the Gap campaign and other programmes are discussed in parts V and VI. 16. Notwithstanding important advances, there are a number of problematic aspects of Australia’s legal and policy regime concerning indigenous peoples, which are discussed below. Especially troublesome is the suite of legislation and programmes known as the Northern Territory Emergency Response, to which the Special Rapporteur devotes special attention in appendix B of this report. III. The stolen generations 17. One of the notorious aspects of the history of discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was the forcible removal of the children of these peoples from their families and communities by government agencies and churches. The 1997 report on the situation, Bringing Them Home, by the National Inquiry into Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From their Families, found that at least 100,000 indigenous children (between 10 and 30 per cent of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations) were removed between 1910 and 1970, and concluded that the forcible removal of children was an act of genocide. The detrimental intergenerational effects of the removal policies have been documented by various sources. For example, one study found that Aboriginal children whose primary caregivers had been forcibly separated from their natural families are over twice as likely to be at high risk of clinically significant 6 GE.10-13887