Because We Need More Protection for White Rights

[bcholmes]

The rights of non-native Canadians would have been threatened had the government not opposed an indigenous rights declaration that the United Nations overwhelmingly approved yesterday, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl said.

The Universal Declaration of Indigenous Peoples' Rights is inconsistent with Canadian legal tradition, and signing on to it would have given native groups an unfair advantage, the minister said.

— Montreal Gazette (A CanWest Global paper)

Apparently we're one of only four countries to vote no. Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

What a surprise: all (ex-)Commonwealth contries, and all in places that got enough imported folks to actually colonize instead of just mooch in and run things for a while before getting tossed out of power.

Which leads me to a vocabulary complaint:

By contrast, most of the supporters of the document have been European countries with few indigenous citizens, such as Denmark and Germany, and much of Latin America, whose record of respecting indigenous rights is often poor.

Uhm, no. It's just in those European countries, White People are the indigenous citizens, and based on the complaints in the press there, they'd kind of like some support of the idea of White Rights, which the phrasing of "Indigenous" would probably give them over incoming Turks, Pakistani, etc.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Actually, Denmark does have an indigenous community which hasn't always been well-treated by European Danes: Greenlanders.