Does Indigenous People Enjoys International legal Personality

Abstract

International law is considered one of the continues developing legal fields not like any other laws such as civil law, and the developments occurs in all its areas. Legal personality is one of the prominent fields in the international law that have seen obvious development especially after the opinioned verdict issued by International court of Justice in 1949, that led to developing a new conception for international personality. When international law set rights and impose obligations on the entity, this means the enjoyment of international legal personality. Furthermore, the development is ongoing in this particular area and recently we have seen that international law began to recognize international legal personality for indigenous people which are socially, culturally distinguished groups of people with unique characteristics. Our arguments in this matter are concluded from the general theory of international legal personality and from the provisions of the treaty No. 169 for the years of 1989 concerning Indigenous people and tribes and United Nations declarations on the rights of indigenous people in 2007. Along with that the international judicial and jurisprudence as well as international practices lean toward recognizing international legal personality for such groups. This considered very important development which may lead to other development enter alia the recognition of legal personality for other groups outside internationality such minorities especially the minorities based on nationality notion, which raises many questions and issues worthy of research.