You are here: Home / Archives for Scientific

The Most Noble Ends

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.”

                                                                                           Ronald Reagan, 1980

 

It is no secret that Ronald Reagan took positions that were strongly opposed to abortion, at least at the time of his Presidency.  After he won the 1980 election, the first thing he said at his first press conference was that he would “make abortion illegal,” and he maintained a strong anti-abortion stance during his years as President.  He consistently opposed not only efforts to maintain the legality of abortion procedures in the United States, but also implemented peripheral policies that sought to advance the objectives of the so-called “pro-life” movement:  school authorities were required to notify parents if their children sought contraceptives at school clinics and workers at family-planning clinics who received federal funds were forbidden to present abortion as a medical option to pregnant women.  And, of course, he was opposed to stem-cell research. 

It is thus a particular irony that since her husband’s death, the most poignant of Nancy Reagan’s few comments on policy have been to advocate support for stem-cell research.  It was in 2004, just months after Ronald Reagan’s death, that she publicly responded to President Bush’s decision to limit funding for such research, criticizing his decision and expressing her opinion that too much time had already been wasted discussing the issue.  In 2009, she publicly praised President Obama for his reversal of the Bush policy. 

But Obama’s decision to lift restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research has not been without consequences.  I commented several months ago about the case of Sherley v. Sebelius here in which District Court Judge Royce Lamberth held that the Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibited federal support of such research, a decision that would have had even more impact on the federal funding of stem-cell research than even the Bush restrictions.  In light of the report in Nature last week that induced pluripotent stem cells — which, unlike embryonic stem cells, can be created without the destruction of embryos — might be rejected by a patient’s own immune system, it seems valuable to review what has happened with Sherley since last August.  A copy of the Nature paper can be found here (subscription required). 

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment is one that no Congress or Administration —Democrat or Republican —can credibly criticize since it has been passed by all as part of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations acts every year since 1995.  It has been passed not only with the signature of Republican President Bush, but also with the signatures of Democrat Presidents Clinton and Obama, after being enacted by both Democrat- and Republican-controlled legislatures.  After the District Court found that funding of embryonic stem-cell research violated the Act and refused to issue a stay until the appellate court reviewed the decision, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia itself stayed the action pending its review.  On April 29, the appellate court issued its ruling, vacating the preliminary injunction and allowing federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to continue. 

In my earlier post, I commented that as “much as I personally support investigations into the use of embryonic stem cells because of their tremendous potential in the treatment of disease, I have difficulty faulting the Court’s decision.”  I found the language of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment unambiguous and dismissed attempts to parse it differently as “contrived.”  Two of the three judges on the Court of Appeals disagreed. 

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment states that “[n]one of the funds made available in this Act may be used for … (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero ….”  The reasoning of the two-judge majority is one that had been rejected in the lower court, namely to parse what the statute means by “research.”  Essentially, investigations into embryonic stem cells require two phases:  a first phase in which embryos are destroyed and the stem cells are derived; and a second phase in which experiments are performed on the already derived stem cells.  The argument accepted by the appellate court is that federal funding of the first phase is prohibited but not federal funding of the second phase since only the first phase constitutes “research in which a human embryo [is] destroyed.” 

To reach this conclusion, the majority notes the use of the present tense in the statute (“are destroyed” instead of “were destroyed”) and consults some online dictionaries for definitions of the word “research.”  I am always wary of these kinds of analysis, which can give the impression of constructing a post-facto rationale for a decision improperly made for other reasons.  Such analysis is too much like relying on the exploitation of loopholes and technicalities instead of principled application of the law as it was written.  I therefore find myself sympathetic with the dissent’s criticism that the judges in the majority have performed “linguistic jujitsu” and “taken a straightforward case of statutory construction and produced a result that would make Rube Goldberg tip his hat.”  A copy of the full opinion and dissent can be read here. 

Researchers are generally pleased with the ruling, but in many ways that represents a short-sighted view.  The problem with the Dickey-Wicker Amendment is especially apparent when the procedural posture of Sherley as it now stands is considered.  So far, the only issue that has been resolved is whether experiments involving embryonic stem cells are “research in which a human embryo is destroyed.”  The case now returns to the District Court for consideration whether such experiments are “research in which a human embryo … is knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero,” a question that potentially raises a host of different arguments.  While it is possible to take other procedural actions at this point — request a rehearing en banc by the full Court of Appeals or petition the Supreme Court to hear the case — those other actions almost certainly represent too much risk to stem-cell researchers. 

As difficult as it may be to do politically, it strikes me as much easier to find a way to avoid the annual ritual of having the Dickey-Wicker Amendment added as a rider to funding bills.

Filed Under: Biology, Federal Regulation, Legal, Medical science, Scientific

What is the Army Doing with your Baby’s Blood?

April 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Like many, I used to love watching The X-Files. The appeal of the show was not just the intricacy of the plot, which had seemingly endless layers of conspiracy, but was also because of the clever way in which factual information was interleaved with fiction, almost making me “want to believe.” One of the most memorable scenes occurs in the show’s third season in an episode titled “Paper Clip,” an obvious reference to the post- World War II “Operation Paper Clip” program by the Office of Strategic Services to sanitize the histories of Nazi scientists so that they could obtain security clearances in the United States. Mulder and Scully find themselves in an abandoned mine in West Virginia. The cavern is filled with filing cabinets, housing “lots and lots of files,” as Scully so artfully described it. Inside the cabinets are smallpox vaccination records and tissue samples collected as part of the Smallpox Eradication Program, creating a comprehensive genetic database for every man, woman, and child born since the 1950’s.

It was creepy. And it made me think about the scar I have on my left shoulder from my own smallpox vaccination.

It is hard not to be reminded of that X-Files episode when reading the complaint in the case of Jeffrey Higgins v. Texas Department of State Health Services. Filed at the end of 2010, the case relates not to smallpox vaccination but to newborn blood screening. In an effort to aid parents in the identification of genetic disease of their newborn child, every state in the United States operates a newborn screening program, and many other countries have similar programs. Such programs began in the late 1960’s and have been expanded over the decades so that virtually all of the 4,000,000 infants born in the United States each year have their heel pricked to collect a few drops of blood around the second or third day of life. Exceptions are rare.

The screening is valuable and provides parents with important medical information that may allow infants born with genetic conditions to have those conditions addressed right from the beginning of their lives. But it is not much of a stretch to understand why medical researchers might have a broader interest in the collection of these samples. Rather than being concerned with a single infant’s condition, the availability of a comprehensive database of newborn blood samples would allow a wide variety of studies to be conducted, looking at patterns of disease that could have profound implications for addressing public-health objectives.

Indeed, in a report published this week in the journal Pediatrics, a copy of which can be found here (subscription required), the authors note the increasing research interest in newborn blood samples. A contract awarded by the National Institutes of Health in 2009 was specifically to develop a “repository of dried bloodspots that is either virtual or physical and comprised of those stored by state newborn screening programs and other resources.” There are certainly positive objectives that could only be reached with access to such blood databases. But the problem is that, in the same way that I found Mulder and Scully’s discovery creepy, many people are uncomfortable having their children’s blood stored in a government database.

This discomfort is justified. There are currently few laws that limit the type of research that may be conducted and most states have no requirement to notify parents that the blood samples may be retained and used for other purposes than the screening of their newborn children. It’s probably fair to say that most never even considered what happened to the blood after collection.

The Higgins case has its origins in an earlier case filed in 2009 when five families sued the Texas Department of State Health Services for the unauthorized storage and use of newborn blood spots. A settlement was negotiated in which Texas agreed to destroy some 5,000,000 newborn blood samples that had been collected and retained since 2002. The Texas legislature also acted — not to limit retention of samples but to provide express government authorization for future samples to be retained. Higgins was filed when it was later revealed that about 8800 samples had been turned over to an Armed Forces laboratory as part of an effort to build a national mitochondrial DNA registry. The stated purpose of the database is forensic, namely to provide a tool by which missing persons may be identified and to aid in the resolution of other difficult cases.

The complaint in Higgins, a copy of which can be found here, alleges that Texas has acted deceptively: “Defendants have knowingly, deceptively, routinely, unlawfully and without the knowledge or consent of the infants’ parents, sold, traded, bartered, and distributed blood samples … to private research companies, government agencies, and other third parties.” A report published by The Texas Tribune that can be found here seems to confirm that records now released by the state “show an effort to limit the public’s knowledge of aspects of the newborn blood program, and to manage the debate around it.” The Tribune skeptically describes “oversights” in response to its requests for information, a pattern of suppressing disclosure about activities related to the blood program, and efforts to “plant” information with sympathetic lawmakers.

I have no doubt that blood databases such as are envisaged have the potential for enormous public good by allowing researchers access to a body of information that is nowhere else available. But the privacy concerns are obvious. Of course people weigh these countervailing issues differently, but the only way to settle the tension between them is by discussing them openly and candidly. One benefit of cases like the one in Texas (and a similar one that failed in Minnesota in 2009) is that public visibility over blood programs is increasing so that that discussion can take place.

Filed Under: Federal Regulation, Legal, Local Regulations, Medical science, Scientific

The Final Frontier

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Circling the earth in the orbital spaceship, I marveled at the beauty of our planet.  “People of the world!  Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!”   —Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin

It was 50 years ago today that the 108-minute orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin ushered in the modern space era.  On April 12, 1961, the 27-year old Gagarin made his way in the early morning to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan.  The launch pad from which he took off in the rocket that carried the single-man Vostok 1 spacecraft remains in use today:  the latest crew of the International Space Station was launched from the same site last week, and to this day cosmonauts ritually stop on the way to “take a leak,” just as Gagarin did that morning.  Gagarin completed a single orbit in his spacecraft before returning to Earth, ejecting himself from the craft at an altitude of about 4 miles and returning to land by parachute.  It was only a few years later, in 1968, that Gagarin would die in a routine training accident, shortly after he had been scheduled for a second mission into space. 

The launching of the “space race” is one that drew humanity together in a time when the world was plagued by the political divisions of the cold war.  To be sure, there was competition between Americans and Soviets in reaching landmark achievements in the exploration of space, but the world also saw the accomplishments of Gagarin, Armstrong, and others more majestically as the accomplishments of Man.  Many of my personal friends were influenced to pursue careers in astronomy and physics because of the excitement of exploration those role models exemplified.  And it is with a certain sadness that they note that it has been almost 40 years (December 19, 1972) since a human being walked on the surface of the Moon.  Like all things, the nature of Man’s relationship with space has changed, as perhaps most iconically exemplified at the moment by the planned termination of the U.S. Space Shuttle program. 

Today, the most pressing concerns for outer space are not its exploration as much as they are its commercial uses.  There are the numerous satellites that have been placed in orbit over the years to provide telecommunications services, resulting in the need to manufacture uplink and downlink terminals, transponders, mobile satellite telephone units, direct-to-home receivers, and other components in addition to the satellites themselves.  There is the use of satellite imagery in the fields of agriculture, geology, forestry, biodiversity conservation, military intelligence, and others, as exemplified by the GeoEye, DigitalGlobe, Spot Image, RapidEye, and ImageSat International projects.  There are the proliferation of satellite navigation systems in the form of global positioning systems in the United States, and the development of similar systems in Russia (GLONASS), China (Compass), and Europe (Galileo).  There is the current development of high-altitude platforms, which are quasi-stationary aircraft that may be deployed at altitudes of 17 – 22 km to provide services for several years.  There are even examples of space tourism as exemplified by Dennis Tito’s tourist flight to the International Space Station in 2001; several companies are now planning “economical” suborbital flights to altitudes of some 100 – 160 km so that tourists can experience the weightlessness and striking views of being in outer space. 

But where is outer space exactly?  The question is not an idle one and can have numerous effects because it defines what law is applicable:  is it the law as embodied in one of the five U.N. treaties related to space or is it a national aviation or other law of the sovereign territory “below” the relevant location?  Historically, the property law was deceptively simple:  “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos” (“the owner of the land owns everything up to the sky and down to the center of the earth”).  The simple idea that each of us owns all of the airspace above our homes is a quaint one but hopelessly unrealistic in modern times. 

As a principle of private ownership, usque ad coelum was soundly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Causby when Thomas Lee Causby complained that flights of military aircraft at an altitude of 83 feet to a nearby Greensboro airport during World War II were so frightening to his chickens that he was forced to abandon his farm business.  The Supreme Court held that the airspace was a “public highway,” and that while a landowner might be entitled to compensation from the government, he has no right to prevent use of the airspace.  A copy of the decision can be found here.

The doctrine retains relevance in the form of national rights.  The 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation asserts that “[e]very state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over airspace above its territory,” leading on occasion to international disputes when aircraft intentionally or accidentally enter another country’s airspace.  A copy of the Convention can be found here. 

But  just as Causby was frustrated by national rights superseding his private rights, so too nations may be frustrated by having a limit to the extent of their airspace rights.  The Outer Space Treaty rejects national rights over outer space, declaring that “the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.” 

So far, there is no internationally recognized limit where national airspace ends and outer space begins.  When the topic has come up in past international discussions, it has generally been decided that there was no current need for a hard definition.  Indeed, the topic was again one focus of the 50th session of the Legal Subcommittee of the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space last week.  During that session a number of potential ways of defining outer space were considered, including both physical definitions and functional definitions.  The various definitions that have been floated over the years appear to be converging around an altitude of 100 km, particularly at the von Kármán line where the Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeronautical purposes.  It is at the von Kármán line that a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to derive adequate aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself. 

It is worth noting that even at altitudes far greater than 100 km, there are already disputes.  The geostationary orbit has a period equal to the Earth’s rotational period so that satellites placed in that orbit appear stationary relative to the Earth.  It occurs directly above the geographic equator at about 36,000 km.  In 1976, eight countries through which the equator passes (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, and Zaire) signed the Bogota Declaration to assert their claim that the geostationary orbit is a “scarce national resource” that is not a part of outer space.  Since the Declaration was signed, other equatorial nations have asserted claims of ownership to their overhead geostationary arcs.  Thus far, the Declaration has been ignored by nations wishing to place satellites in the geostationary orbit, and while the issue of the Bogota Declaration is repeatedly discussed at the U.N., it has been given no legal recognition.  A copy of the Declaration may be found here.

Even though only a handful of humans have been in outer space, it has always and still holds a fascination for us.  Just as we do, our ancient ancestors looked up at the sky — the Sun, the Moon, the stars — and saw reflections of every aspect of our humanity, whether it be romance or war.  To me, the legal issues of how we deal with outer space are, in their own way, just as fascinating as the scientific ones.

Filed Under: Astronomy, International Treaties, Legal, Physics, Scientific

Of Hares and Lions

March 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

Alarmed at sound of fallen fruit
A hare once ran away
The other beasts all followed suit
Moved by that hare’s dismay.

They hastened not to view the scene,
But lent a willing ear
To idle gossip, and were clean
Distraught with foolish fear.

The quotation is a translation from The Jataka, a body of Indian literature that relates to previous births of the Buddha, and dates to somewhere around the third or fourth century BC.  The story is perhaps the origin of the more modern story of Chicken Little, and tells the parable of a hare that lived at the base of a vilva tree.  While idly wondering what would become of him should the earth be destroyed, a vilva fruit made a sound when it fell on a palm leaf, causing the hare to conclude that the earth was collapsing.  He spread his worry to other hares, then to larger mammals, all of them fleeing in panic that the Earth was coming to an end. 

When radiation is discussed in the news, I often think of the story of the hare and vilva tree.  It seems that we are perpetually confronted with calls to overregulate radiation based on irrational fears of its effects on the human body.  Here I mentioned the persistent fears about radiation from cell phones and the passing of legislation in San Francisco last year requiring that retailers display radiation-level information when selling such devices, but there are many others that appear repeatedly in the news:  radiation from power lines, from computer screens, from cell-phone towers, and from any number of common household devices have at times been alleged to be responsible for causing cancer.  All of these allegations have uniformly been discredited in thousands of scientific publications over the last decades because they do not produce radiation at energies sufficient to break chemical bonds, a factor that is critical in the mechanism by which cancer is caused. 

Most recently, of course, there have been widespread reports of radiation being emitted from the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi power plants.  There have been demands for governments to suspend the use of nuclear reactors in generating power and at least the German government appears to be acceding, with Chancellor Angela Merkel using absurd hyperbole in characterizing what is happening in Fukushima as a “catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions.” 

There are legitimate concerns about radiation.  It does cause cancer in human beings.  Regulating our exposure to harmful radiation is an important and necessary role for governments.  But at the same time, rationality must surely prevail based on accurate scientific understanding of the mechanisms by which radiation causes cancer. 

There are a number of simple facts relevant to the debate. 

First, human beings have evolved in an environment in which we are continually exposed to radiation  — from cosmic rays, the Sun, and the ground all around us — and our bodies are adapted to exist with certain levels of radiation.  Indeed, the biological mechanisms by which we evolved as human beings are intimately related to that radiation exposure.  A wonderful graphic produced by Randall Munroe at xkcd illustrates different exposure levels and can be seen here.  One amusing fact shown in the chart is that consumption of a banana exposes a person to more radiation than living within fifty miles of a nuclear power plant for a year — and is dramatically less than the exposure from the natural potassium that exists in the human body. 

Second, there are only a limited number of viable options to produce energy at the levels demanded by modern society.  These are basically through the use of coal power generation and the use of nuclear power generation.  Other “clean” technologies that are frequently pointed to, such as wind and solar power generation, are wonderful technologies that are worth pursuing and which may one day be efficient enough to provide adequate levels of energy to replace coal and nuclear methods.  But that day is not here yet.  Those technologies are simply incapable of producing energy at the levels needed to support modern society and, in any event, have their own environmental concerns that need to be considered and addressed.  I commented, for example, on some environmental concerns associated with wind power generation here. 

Third, with the particular safety mechanisms that are in place, nuclear power generation is safer than coal generation, its only realistically viable alternative.  The xkcd chart cited above notes, for instance, that there is greater radiation exposure from living within 50 miles of a coal power plant for a year than living within the same distance from a nuclear power plant for a year.  The Clear Air Task Force, an organization that has been monitoring the health effects of energy sources since 1996, released a report last year finding that pollution from existing coal plants is expected to cause about 13,200 deaths per year, in addition to about 9700 hospitalizations and 20,000 heart attacks.  A copy of the report can be read here.  Nuclear power generation is also more environmentally responsible since it does not release climate-changing greenhouse gases in the way that coal power generation does.  When considering policy to reduce or eliminate the use of nuclear power — driven largely because the smaller number of deaths from nuclear power result from isolated high-profile events instead of the greater number of deaths that result from the persistent low-level effects of coal power generation — it is important to take these comparisons into account. 

I want to offer a final comment about radiation hormesis, which was recently raised most prominently by political commentator Ann Coulter in the context of the Fukushima event, although it has also been raised by other, more scientifically reliable, sources.  For example, Bob Park, a respected physicist who comments regularly on science and government policy, raised it in the context of a recent study that he interprets as showing that “Chernobyl survivors today suffer cancer at about the same rate as others their age [and that t]he same is true of Hiroshima survivors.”  His remarks can be found here.   Radiation hormesis is an effect in which low-level exposure to radiation produces beneficial effects and that has apparently been observed in laboratory settings.  It has not been convincingly confirmed in human beings and the exposure rates to produce the effect are, in any event, low.  My own view is that pointing to radiation hormesis as a positive argument for the use of nuclear power is counterproductive.  The effect is too speculative and there are too many other — stronger — arguments in its favor. 

The Jataka tells us that when the panicked masses led by the timid hare met a lion, it was he who restored their sensibility.  He brought them to their senses by looking coldly at the facts and determining that the earth was not breaking apart; it was only the misunderstood sound of a vilva fruit.  Let’s be lions, not hares. 

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Law, Federal Regulation, Legal, Physics, Scientific

As Water Inures Its Strokes on the Stone (Part 2)

March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The standoff at Kennedy International Airport in July 2010 was not unexpected, but it did make a point.  The twenty-three members of the Iroquois Lacrosse team presented themselves, planning to take a flight from New York to London so they could participate in the World Lacrosse Championship.  It sounds routine.  But there was one problem. 

The documents the team members presented were traditional, partially hand-written, Haudenosaunee passports issued by the Iroquois Confederacy.  U.S. officials refused to recognize the passports and even after intervention by the U.S. Department of State to make a one-time exception, British officials refused to issue visas.  Compromises were rejected, with the team members refusing to travel on both U.S. and Iroquois documents because they viewed the suggestion as an affront to their claim of sovereignty. 

While the incident highlighted the issue that exists with Haudenosaunee passports, the reality is that they have been used for decades.  Indeed, in 1923, the Cayuga Chief Levi General, more commonly known at the time as Deskaheh, traveled to Geneva on such a passport to address the League of Nations about perceived violations of Iroquois rights by the Canadian government.  The League refused to hear him and a year later when the U.S passed a law to make the Iroquois within its borders citizens and when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded the Iroquois to overthrow its traditional government, those two countries were notified that the Iroquois refused citizenship in any nation other than the Haudenosaunee.  But that has not stopped those countries from claiming those indigenous people as their citizens. 

The refusal by the League of Nations to hear Deskaheh remains iconically at the heart of what many indigenous peoples around the world protest:  the refusal to involve them in decisions that set forth their rights.  There has been some improvement, and the 2007 adoption by the United Nations of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is illustrative.  Drafting of the Declaration took more than 20 years, but involved representatives from indigenous people from different parts of the world.  When it passed, there were only four votes against:  by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all of which have substantial indigenous populations.  Since then, each of those four countries has made moves to endorse the Declaration.  A copy of it can be read here.  

In Part 1 of this post earlier this week, I commented briefly on another standoff between indigenous people and a government:  the Rapa Nui of Easter Island and the country of Chile.  The conflict began in August 2010 when members of the Hito clan occupied the Hanga Roa Hotel, which has for years been a de facto symbol of Chilean encroachment on the Rapa Nui’s perception of their rights.  It was not until 1966 that Chile stopped leasing the island as a sheep farm and granted Chilean citizenship to the Rapa Nui, precipitating a series of land-rights disputes in the 1970’s.  In 1979, Chile passed the Ley de Pasqua (“Law of Easter”), one effect of which was to prohibit the sale of land owned by a Rapa Nui to a non-Rapa Nui.  But in a move whose origins remain unclear, the land where the Hanga Roa hotel sits was conveyed to the German Schiess family.  The Rapa Nui claim the transaction was illegal and in violation of the Ley de Pasqua. 

In the several months since the Hito clan has occupied the hotel, there have been a number of confrontations, culminating in the removal of the Hito clan from the site by the Chilean Carabineros on February 7.  Later in that same month saw an agreement between Chile and the Schiess family for the land to continue to be used by the Schiess family for the next thirty years and then to be conveyed to a private Rapa Nui Foundation.  The problem is the age-old one:  the indigenous Rapa Nui were not involved in the decision and they remain suspicious. 

During the dispute, The Rapa Nui have pointed frequently to Chile’s acceptance of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, particularly those sections dealing with land.  For example, Art. 8(1)(b) requires that “States shall provide effective mechanisms for … redress for … [a]ny action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources.”  Art. 26 goes further, stating that “[i]ndigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use” and that “States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands … with due respect to the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.”  The reality is that the Declaration lacks legal force.  It is relevant only to the extent that indigenous groups are able to embarrass governments by pointing out perceived inconsistencies between their endorsement of it and their actions. 

Today is “Free Rapa Nui Day of Action,” marked by a march and protest at the Chilean Consulate in San Francisco.  It is clearly timed to precede President Obama’s two-day trip to Chile next week, although the issue of the Easter Island dispute is not currently on the agenda. 

It is difficult to know what the outcome will ultimately be of the Rapa Nui efforts.  Some assert that they opportunistically squatted on private land and are abusing the generous intent of efforts like those embodied by the U.N. Declaration.  Others are more sympathetic, seeing the actions as a peaceful attempt to regain control of land that was swindled from them in the course of Easter Island’s turbulent history.  It is certain that those countries that already viewed the U.N. Declaration with suspicion and reluctance are watching, keen to understand the impact its full acceptance could have on their own treatment of indigenous peoples. 

 

Easter Island is a wonderfully unique part of the world that presents mysteries that still fascinate social scientists.  So much of its history has already been irrevocably lost.  Whatever the outcome, I hope its scientific wonder remains preserved so that future generations can enjoy the privilege of experiencing its mystique as fully as I have.

Filed Under: Legal, Linguistics, Local Regulations, Scientific, Social Science
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »