Hannibal Travis, Assistant Professor of Law at Florida International University, has posted a new paper on SSRN that looks fascinating. The paper addresses the plight of indigenous peoples in Iraq and Turkey and suggests four reforms to remedy the “violations of indigenous people’s rights”:

The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to provide an effective remedy to indigenous peoples deprived of their cultural, religious, or intellectual property (IP) without their free, prior and informed consent. The Declaration could prove to be important safeguard for the indigenous peoples of Iraq and Turkey, the victims for centuries of massacres, assaults on their religious and cultural sites, theft and deterioration of their lands and cultural objects, and forced assimilation. These peoples, among them the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis of Turkey and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, and the Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, and Mandaeans of Iraq, have lost more than two-thirds of their peak populations, most of their cultural and religious sites, and thousands of priceless artifacts and specimens of visual art.

The European Union has probed these violations of indigenous people’s rights as part of the process of bringing Turkish laws and policies into compliance with European human rights standards. The United States has investigated violations of the rights of Iraq’s indigenous peoples in reports issued by the various executive agencies and legislative committees.

My paper will summarize the results of these inquiries, and propose four reforms. First, restitution or compensation should be implemented for the widespread destruction of indigenous peoples’ cultural and intellectual properties by previous Turkish and Iraqi regimes. Second, efforts to promote the security of indigenous peoples’ surviving intellectual and cultural patrimony must be adopted. Third, transnational corporations and other large enterprises such as museums and publishers should respect the rights of indigenous people to protect, access, and use their cultural and intellectual property held outside of Turkey and Iraq. Fourth, policies within Turkey and Iraq that restrict the preservation and transmission of indigenous cultural and intellectual manifestations must be reformed or abolished.