Indigenous Children

This chapter considers the major international law instruments that protect the rights of indigenous children. Indigenous children are situated at the intersection of children’s rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, and minority rights against discrimination. A robust corpus of international law has developed in each of these areas, but none were developed to protect indigenous children specifically. The chapter considers the rights protected by all three regimes as they apply to indigenous children, including analyses of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, International Labor Organisation Convention No. 169, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the work of treaty bodies. It considers how rights protected by each regime interact, as well as the tensions and gaps that remain. It describes the potential breadth of international law protections and the limited evidence of implementation. It also discusses the interrelationship between collective and individual rights concepts for indigenous children.