E/CN.4/2003/90 page 2 Executive summary Since the preparation of his first annual report to the Commission on Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people has carried out two official country missions to Guatemala (September 2002) and the Philippines (December 2002) to observe the human rights situation of indigenous peoples. These mission reports are available as documents E/CN.4/2003/90/Add.2 and E/CN.4/2003/90/Add.3. He also visited indigenous communities in Botswana (January 2002), Mexico (April 2002) and Japan (December 2002). As he indicated in his first report to the Commission on Human Rights (E/CN.4/2002/97), the thematic focus of the present report is on the impact of large-scale or major development projects on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples and communities, a subject which many indigenous representatives at the Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues have repeatedly pointed out as being of crucial importance for the full enjoyment of their human rights. By “major development project” should be understood a process of investment of public and/or private, national or international capital for the purpose of building or improving the physical infrastructure of a specified region, the transformation over the long run of productive activities involving changes in the use of and property rights to land, the large-scale exploitation of natural resources including subsoil resources, the building of urban centres, manufacturing and/or mining and extraction plants, tourist developments, port facilities, military bases and similar undertakings. Wherever such developments occur in areas occupied by indigenous peoples it is likely that their communities will undergo profound social and economic changes that are frequently not well understood, much less foreseen, by the authorities in charge of promoting them. Large-scale development projects will inevitably affect the conditions of living of indigenous peoples. Sometimes the impact will be beneficial, very often it is devastating, but it is never negligible. Indigenous peoples are said to bear disproportionately the costs of resource-intensive and resource-extractive industries, large dams and other infrastructure projects, logging and plantations, bio-prospecting, industrial fishing and farming, and also eco-tourism and imposed conservation projects. No activity has shown this situation better than the construction of large multi-purpose dams that affect indigenous areas. This report concentrates therefore on this issue and provides information on the effects of dams on indigenous peoples in Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, India and the Philippines, among others. It also reports on the effects of other kinds of major development activities on indigenous peoples’ rights, such as the Puebla Panama Plan in Mesoamerica. The principal human rights effects of these projects for indigenous peoples relate to loss of traditional territories and land, eviction, migration and eventual resettlement, depletion of resources necessary for physical and cultural survival, destruction and pollution of the traditional environment, social and community disorganization, long-term negative health and nutritional impacts as well as, in some cases, harassment and violence.