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15 QUT L. Rev. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/qutlj15 and id is 1 raw text is: 

QUT Law Review                                     ISSN: (Print) 2205-0507 (Online) 2201-7275
Volume 15, Issue 1, pp 1-2.                                   DOI: 10.5204/qutlr.vl5il.657




                        GUEST EDITORIAL:

  WORLD INDIGENOUS LEGAL CONFERENCE

                     2014 - SPECIAL FORUM

                            MARCELLE BURNS*

The World Indigenous Legal Conference 2014 was hosted by the Indigenous Lawyers
Association of Queensland, and held at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, from
24-27 June 2014. The conference brought together over 250 delegates from the academy, legal
practice, and community and government organisations, representing a diverse range of
Indigenous nations from Australia, Aotearoa, the Americas, Pacific Islands, Asia and Africa to
discuss issues of importance to the survival of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

The conference theme 'Past - Present - Future' was inspired by Indigenous worldviews and
conceptions of time as cyclic rather than lineal - with the present encompassing the past - and
also holding the potential of the future,1 with the conference seeking to progress a meaningful
dialogue about remembering the past and looking to the future. The conference presentations
focused on a number of key legal issues of significance to Indigenous peoples including:

   *   Indigenous human rights
   *   Indigenous knowledges and intellectual property
   *   criminal justice
   *   relationships to land
   *   recognition of Indigenous peoples
   *   economic development.

This collection of papers from the World Indigenous Legal Conference engages with a number
of these conference themes, and particularly focuses on Indigenous human rights. While these
papers deal with a diversity of Indigenous peoples, they also serve to highlight the common
challenges faced by Indigenous peoples worldwide with issues of identity, recognition within
nation states, discrimination, and historical and continuing genocide recurring threats to the
survival of Indigenous peoples, knowledges and law into the future. These struggles are
becoming increasingly urgent given the dire ecological crisis facing the global community, and
the importance of Indigenous knowledge and law to caring for country and restoring harmony
and balance in the relationships between all living things. As will become apparent however it
is difficult to isolate the subject matter of these papers into discrete topics as the issues they
explore are inter-connected, demonstrating the hegemony of state-dominated legal systems and
their discriminatory and assimilationist impacts on first peoples. These papers also bring home

* Marcelle Burns, BA/LLB (Hons) (Southern Cross University), GDLP (College of Law), Predoctoral Fellow,
School of Law, University of New England (Formerly Lecturer, School of Law, Queensland University of
Technology), Conference Committee Member, World Indigenous Legal Conference 2014.
' Irene Watson, Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law (Routledge, 2014), 16 - see book review
in this issue.

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