All Party Parliamentary Group for Tribal Peoples

News

October 2007: Brazilian Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa Yanomami visits Westminster to call on the UK government to ratify ILO Convention 169

May 2007: Right Livelihood Award winner and Botswana Bushman, Roy Sesana, with Martin Horwood MP. Roy visited Westminster to speak about the Bushmen's campaign to return home to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Objectives

To raise Parliamentary and public awareness of tribal peoples.
To promote action inside and outside of Parliament in support of tribal peoples.
To ensure that government does all it can to help threatened tribal peoples.

Activities

To hold two or three meetings every year.
To hold awareness raising events in Parliament.
To raise questions in Parliament.
To monitor how UK policies and UK companies impact on tribal peoples.
To provide contacts for representatives of tribal peoples to Parliament.
To work with legislators from other assemblies around the world.
To advocate for tribal peoples’ rights as described in the International Convention (ILO 169).
To press for the ratification of ILO 169 and support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Where possible, to visit and directly support threatened tribal communities.

Beliefs

The Group believes that tribal peoples are often discriminated against to such an extent that violations of their rights can lead to their destruction.

The Group values the variety of tribal peoples’ ways of life, and the understandings which their own history has led them to, and believes such variety is potentially enriching for all peoples.

Tribal peoples include the world’s men, women and children who seem the most different to ourselves. If we can all realise that they nevertheless have intelligent and humane ways of life, it can make us more likely to accept people in the UK who have merely a different colour, culture or religion. In this way, tribal peoples’ rights are at the vanguard of anti-racism.

Tribal peoples’ rights are also at the heart of the movement to ensure that all development is appropriate and not imposed or destructive, as is often the case.

Survival International

Survival International is the secretariat to the Group. Survival is a NGO established in 1969 in the UK. It is funded by its supporters and accepts no national government money. It has branches in several European countries.

Survival helps tribal peoples defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures. It is an action-oriented organisation, underpinned by expert research.

Survival’s current priorities are the world’s ‘uncontacted’ and little-contacted tribes in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Paraguay and Indonesia; the Bushmen in Botswana; and the Andaman tribes in India. Survival has about 90 cases in 34 countries.

Survival runs educational programmes to demolish the myth that tribal peoples are relics, destined to perish through ‘progress’. It promotes respect for their own choices and explains the contemporary relevance of their ways of life.

Survival emphasises that this is not a romantic throwback to the past, but a contemporary and urgent human rights issue. It also stresses that tribal peoples’ problems are largely solved through the proper recognition of their land rights.

Chairman

Martin Horwood

Secretary

Diane Abbott

Treasurer

John Bercow

Member list

Full list of current members

All Party Parliamentary Group

for tribal peoples