Defending Land and Water: Using Customary International Law to Advance Indigenous Rights in Settler Canadian Law
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has been gradually working towards implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Recent case law from the Supreme Court affirms that UNDRIP is an interpretative source for Canadian law, but the impact of UNDRIP on constitutional jurisprudence, particularly section 35, remains an open question. While UNDRIP is a non-binding declaration, certain articles of the Declaration may be considered to represent customary international law (CIL). This includes Article 25, which recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to “maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.” I argue that Article 25 of UNDRIP is CIL and therefore binding on Canada. Indeed, I argue that Article 25 bridges a gap that currently exists in Canadian law wherein spiritual rights and the protection of territory are seen as distinct, thereby excluding claims by Indigenous Nations and communities who seek to protect their sacred territories. I do so by analyzing existing domestic and international case law on CIL, with a focus on the kinds of evidence and arguments considered by Canadian courts when weighing whether or not a binding custom exists.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it