Between July 13 and 17, the Meli Network will join, for the first time, a session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), in Geneva — a milestone in our network’s journey within international spaces for rights advocacy.

Author: Ana Rosa de Lima
Leia em português. Léalo en Español.

Between July 13 and 17, the 19th session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) will take place in Geneva — an advisory body to the United Nations Human Rights Council. With the support of a grant from the UN Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples, Meli will take part, for the first time, in a United Nations mechanism. We will do our best to bring our communities’ voices to this space dedicated to the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

With this goal in mind, we know it’s essential to listen to the whole Network and prepare collectively, co-building our position for the event. To do this, we had several moments of collaboration within our Network, including two Roda de Conversa (open dialogue) calls open to participation from the entire Network. These were moments to raise urgent issues from the communities, and we saw the sheer scale of Indigenous rights abuses that still repeat themselves.

One of the calls included the participation of Christina Stanton, director of the American Indian Law Clinic at the University of Colorado Boulder. Having attended the session multiple times before, she shared insights into what the event is like, helping us understand and prepare for it.

During these calls, multiple perspectives present within our Network were shared, starting with the centrality of territory to Indigenous rights. Participants raised recent disappearances and killings of Indigenous leaders; the ongoing encroachment of illegal mining into Indigenous territories; the erasure of Indigenous culture, something visible both in the difficulties of land reclamation (retomadas) in urban contexts and in the presence of churches in these territories; the lack of effective prior consultation; and the challenges in Indigenous education, which connects to the importance of telling our own stories and recognizing Indigenous people as holders of knowledge, for equal partnerships with academia. We saw structural problems, such as the gap between the formal recognition of Indigenous rights and their effective implementation.

Based on these initial calls, we also held calls with specific communities to better understand their particular situations, resulting in three letters:

• Letter 1: Xochimilco & Topolobampo — In Xochimilco, the Nahua people face contamination, urban expansion, and the abandonment of the chinampas — an ancient Indigenous agricultural system — without real participation in decisions concerning their own territory. In Topolobampo, the Mayo Yoreme Nation is resisting the construction of an ammonia plant in the Bay of Ohuira, financed by the German public bank KfW-IPEX; although Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered an Indigenous consultation, the affected communities report that the process did not meet international standards and that their rejection of the project was ignored.
• Letter 2: Alto Solimões — In Alto Solimões, in the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous communities from multiple ethnicities face a highly complex environment, strongly linked to illegal mining in Indigenous territory and the presence of drug trafficking driven by international cocaine consumption. This situation directly impacts these communities’ territorial sovereignty and safety.
• Letter 3: Indigenous Languages — Based on our experiences during the Guardians of Biodiversity project, we shared a few learnings.

This participation marks another step for Meli Network in building bridges between local experiences and global spaces — bringing communities’ voices directly to the international mechanisms that discuss their rights.

*Cover image for illustrative purposes only.