On January 31, 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group held the Universal Periodic Review of Japan's human rights record. The Universal Periodic Review is a process through which all UN member countries assess each other's human rights circumstances in light of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights treaties, and other mechanisms and provide recommendations for areas that need to be improved.

I write as a Mashpee Wampanoag. It is who I am and inevitably shapes my views. The Wampanoag have the distinction of being among the “first contact” Tribes in the Americas, and as such we have a four-centuries-old tradition of interacting with the forces of colonization. This means we have four centuries of grievances, but also four centuries of solutions based on experience. We have seen time and again that the promises of “forever” rarely last more than 30 years.

Over the past few years, the European Union has undertaken a more robust legislative approach requiring a more human rights-focused and environmentally conscious framework in its legislative initiatives.

In the United States, March is Women's History Month. The official designation seeks to highlight the struggle of women in public life and in achieving gender equality. The UN established March 8 as International Women’s Day, which has become a day of vibrant social movements around the world such as collective marches led by and for women.

Every year on March 22, the world celebrates World Water Day, a day dedicated to promoting the importance of freshwater and raising awareness about the global water crisis. This year's theme is "Accelerating Change," which emphasizes the urgency for better water governance and management.

“The exercise of self-determination is a necessary task prior to the consultation because we have seen that many consultation exercises begin as a reaction to someone who wants to set up a project or a mine. Part of the community becomes active, but since the community is not consulted as a People, internal conflicts begin there.

For 51 years, Cultural Survival has partnered with Indigenous communities to advance Indigenous Peoples' rights and cultures worldwide. We envision a future that respects and honors Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights and dynamic cultures, deeply and richly interwoven in lands, languages, spiritual traditions, and artistic expression and rooted in self-determination and self-governance.

In 2022, The Zienzele Foundation identified the need for a communal space in the Chiware region of Zimbabwe for Shona women’s cooperatives to host their organizational meetings, health clinics, and marketing of traditional handicraft work. In collaboration with Cultural Survival’s Keepers of the Earth Fund, they have since built a community center complex near the village of Mupagamuri to serve the five surrounding villages.

While the power groups and bureaucratic machinery label anyone who protests against the transitional civic-military government as terrorists, Indigenous Peoples and campesinos in Peru only respond loudly, Kachkaykuraqmi! (We continue to exist!) The current situation in Peru describes not a sporadic scene of emotional turmoil, as many believe and attribute, but rather the opening and bleeding of a never-healed historical wound that divides Peru into two worlds: those above and those below, the visible an