UNDRIP
Definition
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (A/RES/61/295, 2007), adopted by 143 states. Articles 11, 12, and 31 affirm indigenous peoples' rights to their cultural heritage, including human remains, and state obligations to provide redress including restitution.
- Adopted
- 2007, UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/61/295
- Support
- Adopted by 143 states
- Key articles
- Articles 11, 12 and 31 on cultural heritage and remains
- Legal status
- Declaration, not a binding treaty
Common questions
How does UNDRIP affect the handling of human remains held by museums or universities?+
It affirms indigenous peoples' right to their ceremonial objects and human remains and calls on states to enable repatriation, which has driven institutions to review and return skeletal collections even where no domestic law like NAGPRA compels it.
Does UNDRIP create an enforceable right to repatriation?+
Not directly, since it is a declaration rather than a treaty, but many states have used it as the moral and policy basis for domestic repatriation legislation and institutional policy.
Related terms
- Bass Donated Skeletal Collection
- A consent-based skeletal collection of over 1,750 individuals at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, established by William Bass in 1981. All individuals...
- Cultural Affiliation (NAGPRA)
- The link, established by a preponderance of evidence, between a present-day tribe or Native Hawaiian organisation and human remains or cultural items...
- Culturally Unidentifiable Remains
- Human remains in US museum and agency collections whose cultural affiliation with any present-day tribe cannot be established by the preponderance-of-evidence standard....
- De Montfort Precedent (2018)
- The return by De Montfort University Leicester of skeletal remains (Asaru-Ojo) to the Ogoni community in Nigeria, conducted voluntarily under the Human...
- Hamann-Todd Collection
- A skeletal reference collection of approximately 3,100 individuals at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, accumulated 1893 to 1939 from unclaimed bodies...
- NAGPRA
- The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Public Law 101-601, 1990), a US federal statute requiring museums and federal agencies to...
- Population Affinity
- The preferred modern forensic-anthropological term for the relationship between an unidentified individual's skeletal morphology and a modern reference population. Replaces the older...
- Terry Collection
- A documented skeletal collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington DC), assembled from cadavers donated to Washington University's anatomy...
- Willed-Body Donation
- The voluntary, pre-mortem consent by an individual to donate their remains to a specific research programme after death. Distinguished from anatomical donation...