In September 2025, the Institute of the Rights of Peoples (IRP), UNPO’s partner in Tartu, Estonia, convened a workshop at the University of Tartu to do something that institutional memory had failed to do for fifteen years: bring the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (UDRP) back to the centre of the conversation.
The Declaration, drafted through UNPO’s Tartu Coordination Office in 1998–1999 and adopted at UNPO’s Sixth General Assembly in Tallinn in 2001, is one of the most significant and least recognised contributions to the international framework of peoples’ rights. Its architect was Dr. Linnart Mäll, UNPO’s first Chairman and the founder of the IRP. After his death in 2010, the Declaration receded from institutional memory. The 2025 workshop was a first step toward changing that.
Bringing together individuals who participated in the UDRP’s original drafting alongside current researchers and practitioners, the workshop explored the Declaration’s origins, its intellectual depth, and, crucially, its relevance today. It examined what it means that a founding text on peoples’ rights has to be recovered through archival work in one person’s personal papers. And it asked the harder question: how do we now make it useful?
The IRP and UNPO share a founding lineage and a common conviction: that peoples, not only states, must be subjects of international law. In a moment when the language of self-determination is being systematically weaponised by authoritarian actors, and when climate displacement and resource extraction are making questions of land, identity, and survival existential for communities across the world, that conviction is not a historical curiosity. It is a pressing necessity.
The full account of the workshop, covering the UDRP’s historical context, its substantive content, and the challenge of operationalising it in today’s geopolitical climate, is published at the UNPO Academy. We invite you to read it, share it, and engage with it.
