Annual Lecture on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Date: 5 February 2021
Time: 15.00:16.30 Norwegian time (8.00-9.30 a.m. Guatemala time)

Venue: Zoom/Youtube

To celebrate the Sami National Day, LawTransform, in collaboration with the Bergen Sami Society, invites you the 4th Annual Lecture on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Francisco Calí Tzay, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples will speak on:

Violent conflicts over indigenous peoples’ land

The Annual Lecture marks the National Day of the Sami People on February 6th and aims to bring attention to pressing questions regarding indigenous peoples’ rights in Norway and globally. This year’s focus is on violence against indigenous people in the context of rights to land.

The lecture will be followed by a panel debate with Tatiana Alfonso (ITAM, Mexico City) and Eva Maria Fjellheim (University of Tromsø, Norway). Moderated by Rachel Sieder (CIESAS, Mexico and CMI/LawTransform).

Francisco Calí Tzay is Maya Kaqchikel from Guatemala, with experience in defending the rights of Indigenous Peoples, both in Guatemala and at the level of the United Nations and the OAS. He was founder and member of a different indigenous organizations in Guatemala and as well Ambassador of Guatemala to the Federal Republic of Germany and was President of the Committee for the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, a treaty body from which he was elected for four consecutive periods of 4 years each.

Tatiana Alfonso is a full-time professor at ITAM Law School. PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.A. in Sociology at the same institution. Psychologist and lawyer from Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Her research interests include sociology of law, race and ethnicity, sociology of development, and she is particularly interested in how legal and political institutions may have distributive effects between unequal actors in society.

Eva Maria Fjellheim is a PhD student at the Center for Saami Studies (SESAM) at the University of Tromsø. Her academic background is within human geography and development studies, with inter-disciplinary research interest focused on indigenous studies. She has previously worked with indigenous rights issues (particularly education and territorial rights) in both Latin America and the Saami area through international cooperation, solidarity work, politics and journalism.

Rachel Sieder is Senior Research Professor at the Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She is an associate senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, and associate fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has an MA in Latin American Studies and a PhD in Politics from the University of London. Her research interests include: human rights, indigenous rights, social movements, indigenous law, legal anthropology, the state, and violence.