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place over the past three years, including work carried out by the Working Group on
the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other busines s
enterprises and the Forum on Business and Human Rights. In this context, there has
been some progress in terms of raising the concerns of indigenous peoples,
especially in relation to extractive industries. The participation of indigenous
representatives in the processes of the Working Group and the Forum should
continue and financial support should be provided for this purpose.
46. The Special Rapporteur also emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the
sustainable development goals and the post-2015 development agenda are inclusive
and reflective of indigenous peoples’ development aspirations, bringing together
economic, social, cultural, environmental and climatic concerns, to be addressed in
an integrated manner.
Invisibility of the situation of indigenous peoples and disaggregated data
47. The Special Rapporteur is deeply concerned that the particular situation of
indigenous peoples often remains invisible within national statistics. This is true in
many developing countries, which often have weak institutional capacities for data
collection. Further complicating this situation is the fact that in many of these
countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, the formal identification and recognition
of indigenous peoples is still pending, and disaggregation of data based on ethnicity
may be considered, for various reasons, to be controversial. Given the importance of
this issue, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has made it an ongoing area
of focus, and has issued numerous recommendations for States, indigenous
organizations and United Nations agencies, in particular the Statistics Division of
the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, to collaborate on data
disaggregation and collection. 12
48. The existence of relevant information is a vital precondition for devising
adequate policy responses for addressing inequalities and for monitoring the
effectiveness of measures to overcome discrimination, both within and between
countries, as well as for identifying additional gender-based discrimination. In this
context, the Special Rapporteur commends the efforts of the Economic Commission
on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to “democratize information”. With
the support of a number of United Nations agencies, donor agencies and private
funders, the Commission has established a comprehensive database, which provides
sociodemographic data on indigenous peoples and Afro -descendants in the region,
including data disaggregated by sex and age, as well as data on internal migration,
health, youth and the territorial distribution of inequalities. 13 The basis of much of
this impressive work is the inclusion by most countries in Latin America of an
“indigenous identifier” into their 2000 census round, thus building data through the
self-identification of individuals as being a member of an indigenous community. 14
49. The Special Rapporteur notes that some individual countries have made
similar progress with regard to disaggregation of data in their population and
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12
13
14
14-58847
See E/2007/43-E/C.19/2007/12, para. 123.
See the ECLAC database at: http://www.cepal.org/cgi-bin/getprod.asp?xml=/celade/noticias/
paginas/0/36160/P36160.xml&xsl=/celade/tpl/p18f.xsl&base=/celade/tpl/top-bottom_ind.xsl.
See Sistema de Indicadores Sociodemográfico de Poblaciones y Pueblos Indígena de América,
CELADE/CEPAL — Fondo Indígena: Guia para el usuario, available at: http://celade.cepal.org/
redatam/PRYESP/SISPPI/SISPPI_notastecnicas.pdf.
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