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Invoking International Law
Chief Ted Moses, Ambassador to the
United Nations for the
Grand Council of the Crees (of
Quebec).
The following is excerpts from Ambassador Moses' keynote address at the Special Convocation held at the
University of Saskatchewan on June 27, 1996 in which honorary degrees of Doctorates of Laws were granted to Erica-Irene Daes, Ted Moses and Rigoberta Menchú Túm. The ceremony was held in conjunction with the 1996 International SSHRCC Summer Institute "Cultural Restoration of Oppressed Indigenous Peoples" hosted by the Aboriginal Organizing Team,
University of
Saskatchewan, under the direction of Dr. Marie Battiste.
I would like to reflect today on the international recognition of the rights of the world's indigenous peoples. ...
The United Nations was founded on the principle that the interests of the international community would not be bound up in the lowest common denominator of the legal systems of its members States. There would be a higher standard. States would have to acquiesce to the principle that the rights of human beings inhere in themselves, and not in the State.
Unfortunately, the international community has not been completely successful in leaving behind the special interests of its members. Diplomats regularly receive instructions to vote in the United Nations so as to preserve the legal status quo of the States they represent. Then they proceed to dress this crude obedience to their ministers in a fabric of fine words expounding rights and precedents in international law. ...
The
Grand Council of the Crees first went to the United Nations in 1981. Tommy Wapachee, a Cree infant from Nemaska, had died on 11 August 1980. An epidemic of measles, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis took the lives of eight Cree children before the end of that year.
It was not the first time disease had killed our children, but circumstances had changed. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, our treaty with Canada and Quebec, had promised clean water, sanitation, medical services, and clinics; and none of these had been put in place. The sad fact was that the children need not have died if the governments had kept their promises and respected their own laws.
We went to the international community because after five years, using every means to enforce and implement the treaty, we had essentially exhausted our remedies in Canada. We went to the courts, we lobbied, we spoke to the media, we brought in engineers and doctors; but the governments waited us out. By 1981 we had nowhere to turn, except to the international community.
Some of the people here in this room today were at that meeting in Geneva in 1981. There was no working group on indigenous populations, no Martinez-Cobo Report on discrimination against indigenous peoples. In Geneva we described our situation in Canada. Others described terrible atrocities in their own lands. Some who went to that meeting were never seen again after they went home. They were punished for telling us about their world.
Some of our Cree delegates were told: You are lucky you live in Canada where it is not that bad. I took no comfort in that. That was before Oka, and I think before Restiguche. I was not going to let Canada off of the hook because it was worse somewhere else. What logic supports that kind of thinking?
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