Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in Mexico: Elements for its construction and challenges
Jose Israel Herrera
The Age of Human Rights Journal, June 2019; 12 pp.62-83
Open Access
Abstract
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) – Consultation has become one of the most powerful tools indigenous people and minorities have to generate a dialogue and begin a negotiation in the country to face Government decisions, private companies seeking to carry out any work or when legislative measures are about to be implemented on their territories with a possibility of damaging them. In Mexico, this right is based over a group of not articulated among themselves normative foundations. This end up causing confusion and uncertainty on its application. This article presents elements to review the FPIC – Consultation foundations in Mexico for discussion and theoretical deepening in the light of human rights.

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent in the Philippines: A Fourth World Critique
Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights book series (CHREN, volume 3)
Armi Beatriz E. Bayot
Human Rights in the Extractive Industries, 14 June 2019; pp 281-309
Abstract
When it comes to the planning and execution of resource use activities, indigenous peoples’ voices do not carry the same weight as those of states—not even when the activity at issue will have a profound and irreversible impact on indigenous peoples’ survival. As illustrated by how the norm of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) is implemented in the Philippines, this is due to competing state-centric international and domestic legal norms that privilege state prerogatives over natural resources vis-à-vis indigenous peoples’ rights over their territories. The doctrine of state sovereignty is so fundamental in international law that states’ acknowledgment of indigenous peoples’ rights, in general, and FPIC, in particular, continue to be qualified by this doctrine. FPIC, therefore, remains to be a regime of unfulfilled promise due to the inherent power imbalance in the international law framework in which it exists, which is based on a Western conception of state sovereignty that denies the (pre-)existence and validity of indigenous polities and their historical sovereignty. The way forward is to assert indigenous peoples’ participation in international law-making, based on their right to self-determination and historical sovereignty, to empower them to influence the content of other norms of international law that affect them—not just those international law norms that ostensibly exist specifically for the protection of indigenous peoples (such as FPIC).

Second Wave Due Diligence: The Case for Incorporating Free, Prior, and Informed Consent into the Deep Sea Mining Regulatory Regime
Julian Aguon, Julie Hunter
Stanford Environmental Law Journal, 10 February 2019; 38(1) pp 3-55
Abstract
This Article calls for the norm of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for indigenous peoples to be applied to deep sea mining (DSM) projects carried out in the international seabed, particularly in the Pacific region, where numerous indigenous communities stand to be directly and disproportionately impacted by this new extractive industry. Our argument, while novel, relies on core prescriptions of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) requiring compliance with international law in general, including pertinent rules of international environmental and indigenous rights law. UNCLOS’s clear parameters on the prevention of harm to the marine environment, expounded upon by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in a series of key decisions, have created a due diligence standard that is imposing ever higher duties on an increasingly wide range of actors, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This standard is evolving alongside a robust norm requiring the FPIC of indigenous peoples threatened by large-scale extractive activities, even if those activities are not directly carried out on indigenous land. When applied to DSM, whose exploratory stage has already resulted in an array of adverse impacts to Pacific indigenous peoples, these normative legal developments coalesce into a compelling argument for placing impacted indigenous peoples into key decision-making roles. Such an approach, which we call a “second wave” of due diligence, represents a decisive break from a destructive history in which the Pacific served as a proving ground for the experiments of others, and a concrete step toward sustainable, rights-based development in the twenty-first century and beyond.