The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights made a call for inputs into a study on “Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Data, including data collection and disaggregation”. This submission by the Advisory Board on Ethics (ABE) of the International Statistical Institute is in response to that request and can be found here:
By way of background, ABE was asked to review whether the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement in some countries had implications for the International Statistical Institute’s Declaration of Professional Statistical Ethics. To support this review, a study of the different approaches to IDG around the world was undertaken. This work was overseen by an Indigenous Statistics Working Group, a small subcommittee of ABE.
The objective of the review was to better understand the nature of statistical governance arrangements between countries and their Indigenous peoples. It does not attempt to make the arguments for and against Indigenous Data Sovereignty. That is beyond our expertise.
However, it became clear during our work that international work on Indigenous Statistics is limited and there needs to be more. As a step in that direction, ABE recommended a Special Interest Group on Indigenous Statistics. This has been approved by the ISI Executive and only needs endorsement by Council before it can be established.
