Working Group on Indigenous Populations
former United Nations working group
The Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) was a subsidiary body within the structure of the United Nations. It was established in 1982, and was one of the six working groups overseen by the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, the main subsidiary body of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (defunct 2006).
The WGIP had the following mandate:
to review developments pertaining to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples;
to give attention to the evolution of international standards concerning indigenous rights.
Following the establishment of the United Nations Human Rights Council,
the role of the Working Group, which was a substructure of the disbanded United Nations Commission on Human Rights came under review. Some governments argued, that the working group duplicated the work of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) and should therefore be discontinued, while indigenous peoples and NGOs pointed out that the UNPFII is not a human rights body and that the Working Group is the only body within the United Nations system that specifically deals with standard-setting concerning the human rights of indigenous peoples.
Eventually, the working group was discontinued and replaced by the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which held its first session in Geneva from 29 September to 3 October 2008.
“Working Group on Indigenous Populations” enters the record as former United Nations working group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Working, Group and Indigenous can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2467353. VIAF identifies the subject as 123316456. The Library of Congress control number is n95102398. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 2006 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Working Group on Indigenous Populations” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.