This seminar will provide a historical overview of the the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP); explain its most contentious aspects and its legal and political significance for Indigenous Australia. The seminar is based on a paper published by Megan Davis in the Melbourne Journal of International Law on the UN DRIP.

Megan Davis is Director of the Indigenous Law Centre and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law. She is an Australian member of the International Law Association’s Indigenous Rights Committee drafting the Expert Commentary on the UN DRIP, and a CAEPR Visiting Research Fellow while completing her doctoral thesis on Aboriginal women and self-determination at the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), ANU.

The paper on which the seminar is based is Indigenous Struggles in Standard-Setting: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Melbourne Journal of International Law, Volume 9:2, May 2008.