Internally Displaced Persons and Indigenous Peoples: The Necessity of a Special Protection Regime

The situation of internally displaced persons (hereinafter IDPs) around the glob is getting worse by the minute. The international community has responded by creating norms that ban the actions of belligerents (during armed conflicts) and States (in times of peace) which produce the unlawful displacement of people. However, an important part of the IDPs in the Americas are Indigenous Peoples; and even though there are some specialized norms for protecting them of the displacement, those norms focus exclusively in the proprietary interest of Indigenous peoples. I will use a philosophical approach to explore the necessity and possible content of a special IDP-protection regime for Indigenous Peoples. I will pay special attention to the situation and solution presented in the Moiwana v. Suriname case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; but without loosing sigh from the fact that the protection granted to Indigenous Peoples in this case came from a remarkably broad interpretation of the American Convention on Human Rights.