UNPO recently submitted input to the Working Group on Business and Human Rights ahead of its thematic study on Indigenous Peoples’ Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), aiming to help States, businesses, and investors understand and fulfill their obligations in accordance with international standards.
For unrepresented nations and peoples, the right to self-determination is not an abstract political principle; it is a lived reality, shaped by the ability to govern lands, protect cultural heritage, and sustain livelihoods. FPIC is a vital mechanism through which this right is realised, operationalising peoples’ right to decide their futures, including the ability to refuse and maintain control over their lands and resources. While FPIC is most clearly codified for Indigenous Peoples, its underlying principles are universally relevant. UNPO stresses that these protections must extend to all unrepresented peoples, addressing colonial legacies and ongoing dispossession.
In its submission, UNPO highlighted examples from Guam, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Ogoniland, Balochistan, Tibet and West Papua, illustrating the repercussions of limiting self-determination and FPIC.
Guam, a UN-listed non-self-governing territory, remains under U.S. colonial control. The Indigenous Chamorro face dispossession, discrimination, and health issues due to long-standing and ongoing U.S. military activities. Current expansion, without Chamorro FPIC, displaces communities, destroys ancestral lands, and deepens dependency and health crises. Guam illustrates that denying FPIC sustains colonial domination, emphasizing that Indigenous consent is vital for decolonization and the broader right to self-determination.
Bangladesh’s 54 Indigenous communities face dispossession, repression, and criminalisation as large-scale development projects, military camps, tourism, and economic zones encroach upon their ancestral lands, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. A key example is the 2022 seizure of 3,500 acres in Bandarban District by the Lama Rubber Company, supported by security forces, which destroyed forests and crops, causing food and water shortages. The lack of FPIC mechanisms underscores how development is used to violate Indigenous and collective rights, mirroring widespread land grabbing.
Decades of oil extraction, gas flaring, and pollution have devastated Ogoniland in Nigeria’s Rivers State, contaminating waterways and eroding farmlands crucial to the Ogoni people’s livelihood and culture. The Ogoni have faced systemic environmental degradation and human rights violations, including uncompensated oil spills often carried out without their FPIC, and a lack of remediation. Despite this, the Ogoni have led peaceful efforts, including legal action against Shell, in their ongoing struggle for environmental justice, protection of livelihoods, and self-determination in the Niger Delta.
Major development projects in Balochistan, such as the Reko Diq mine and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), are proceeding without the FPIC or meaningful consultation of the Baloch people, despite their deep ties to their ancestral lands. The exclusion of Baloch communities from decision-making, coupled with a lack of transparency and unrecognised traditional governance structures, has led to environmental degradation, water scarcity, forced displacement, and broken economic promises.
China’s more than 70-year occupation of Tibet has facilitated widespread human rights violations and environmental degradation, driven in large part by large-scale hydropower and dam projects. Since 2000, plans for 193 dams threaten to displace up to 1.2 million Tibetans, destroy cultural sites, and disrupt the ecosystems that sustain approximately 1.8 billion people across Asia. The PRC’s claim to sovereignty over Tibet, combined with the denial of FPIC, enables unchecked extractive activities that imperil both the Tibetan people and the broader region’s ecological and social wellbeing.
West Papua remains one of the world’s most overlooked regions, where Indigenous communities face persistent human rights violations, denial of self-determination, and systematic efforts to suppress their identity. Large-scale resource extraction, deforestation for agribusiness, and land grabs occur without FPIC, displacing communities and destroying cultural and spiritual ties to the land. Heavy militarisation, restrictions on freedom of expression, and targeting of activists compound these violations, reflecting a broader pattern of internal colonialism and racialized exclusion that threatens the memory, dignity, and existence of the West Papuan people.
The experiences of UNPO members are indicative of a consistent pattern. When peoples are systematically excluded from decision-making processes affecting their lands and resources, the consequences extend far beyond environmental harm. They encompass the erosion of cultural identity, the destruction of traditional livelihoods, forced displacement, deepening divisions, and the perpetuation of historical exclusion. For UNPO members, FPIC is inseparable from the right to self-determination and must be upheld by States, companies, and investors as a binding human rights obligation, not an optional gesture.
Read our full submission here
