""Sustainability is an empty word if you don't respect and implement Indigenous rights here in our homelands.""
"Across the globe, Indigenous peoples looking to protect their land, resources, and culture from green energy projects are turning to the same multifaceted entity to help them: the United Nations.
The international arena makes sense. With little recourse in the courts systems of the countries that colonized them, the U.N. provides an important legal pathway, especially when it comes to development projects in Indigenous homelands.
This dynamic has become increasingly visible in the Nordic nations, where a public reputation for respecting human rights has clashed with those countries’ treatment of Indigenous Sámi peoples: In Norway, the government has had to pay millions for violating the rights of Sámi reindeer herders by illegally building a massive onshore wind park, while in Sweden, a proposed iron mine threatens to upend Sámi protections of a UNESCO world heritage site that is also critical to supporting traditional culture and livelihoods.
And just last week, two different U.N. committees found that Finland violated the rights of the Sámi by granting mineral exploration permits in Finnish Sápmi — the homelands of the Sámi peoples that cross Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia."
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