As shrinking resource reserves require industrialization to push deeper into areas that have in the past been insulated from development, all around the world the last remaining indigenous societies are falling prey. Confronted with this human tragedy, environmentalists are finally taking action, joining the ranks of the human rights advocates who have been struggling to protect these peoples and their lands. From the Arctic to the Amazon, we are now struggling together to preserve these peoples, their lands and their cultures. This partnership between environmental advocates and human rights advocates is beginning to pay off in ways we never would have imagined. Brazil and Canada have committed to increasing the territories of their indigenous populations.15 The World Bank has issued an indigenous peoples directive intended to ensure that World Bank projects do not adversely affect indigenous peoples.
Substantively, we must develop legal frameworks that will enable us to expand on and protect these gains. For example, there is growing recognition that the right to a safe and clean environment, embodied in Stockholm Principle 1, is more than compelling rhetoric; it has meaning in the sense that there are legal rights that relate to the environment. For example, there is now a call for the creation of new schemes of property rights in intellectual property and biological information to take into account the value of foods and medicines that can be derived from plants and animals within indigenous territories and of indigenous knowledge of these resources.
Procedurally, we must develop the necessary legal mechanisms and form a way to protect these emerging rights and principles. A first step in this direction is the decision of the Texas Supreme Court that the doctrine of forum non conveniens does not preclude a suit by a foreign national against a Texas company for alleged tortious conduct occurring outside of the United States.18 This decision allows, at least for the time being, foreign individuals (including indigenous peoples) injured by the actions of corporations with minimum contacts to Texas to sue for harms incurred, even though the domestic law of the nation in which the harm occurred may not recognize a reasonable person minimum standard of conduct.