Indigenous Peoples and International Law in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

The adoption and ratification of new conventions and treaties under international law designed to protect both Indigenous peoples and the rights of nature have resulted in successful rulings by local, federal, and regional courts in favor of Indigenous groups engaged in class-action suits against their governments. In 2012 and 2019, respectively, the Sarayaku Kichwa and the Huaorani and Cofán peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon won cases against the Ecuadorian government for its lack of consultation on planned oil exploration. Such cases upholding the correct application of the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) under international treaties are rare; more often, Western judicial systems and environmental impact assessments have been used to serve corporate interests, as exemplified by the Aguinda v. Texaco case initiated in 1993 and the planned operations of Andes Petroleum in Orellana province 2019–2020, respectively. Indigenous and non-Western epistemologies tend to be incompatible with state-driven liberal secular capitalism—hence Indigenous efforts to prevent land seizures and the expansion of the extractive frontier into Indigenous territories in the Amazon rainforest have been undermined by the imperatives of modernization/developmentalism. These same forces have stimulated demand for gold, the legal and illegal mining of which, along the Napo river, have caused the contamination of the waters of the Amazon, threatening the health of Indigenous and non-indigenous riverine communities.

Ius Constituendum Formulating Basic Values of Indigenous Peoples in Constitutional Amendments

“…Customary forests in the MHA perspective are actually part of customary rights which orient the MHA's authority in managing natural resources, in this context forest resources. 23 The formulation of customary forests as state forests by the Constitutional Court MHA Decision is considered a form of determination and hegemony by the state which seizes customary forests which even factually existed earlier than the State of Indonesia. The above MK MHA decision can be categorized as an embodiment of the living constitution, which is the flexibility of interpreting the constitution based on a particular context.. 24 Apart from that, in the essence of the living constitution, the MK MHA Decision above also increasingly emphasizes one of the basic principles of MHA, namely the existence of customary rights which is generally interpreted as the right for MHA to manage natural resources independently and sustainably in accordance with applicable customary law norms.…”

Bacterial Diversity in Old Hydrocarbon Polluted Sediments of Ecuadorian Amazon River Basins

“…Most of the oil drilling exploitations in the Ecuadorian Amazon have polluted large areas of the territory, dumping highly toxic waste and wastewater into rivers and estuaries, in addition to the groundwaters and the atmosphere, affecting Ecuadorian Amazon BESs [ 24 ]. Part of the exploited Amazonian areas are located within important protected areas such as the Yasuní National Park and Biosphere Reserve, as well as the Limoncocha Biological Reserve, designated as Ramsar Wetland (UNESCO, 1998).…”