Discrimination Against Women vis-à-vis the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). While the state has reported considerable progress in the prevention and protection of women against all forms of violence, including instituting measures towards such, it is silent in terms of effective implementation, practice and substantial results. The invisibility of indigenous women throughout the report is alarming despite various national campaigns by indigenous peoples organizations and communities on various issues from ancestral land recognition to militarization and displacement and lately, the violent dispersal of indigenous and rural communities seeking government relief from the impacts of drought in Cotabato. This does not bode well for a state that has, in fact, pioneered in enacting an Indigenous Peoples Rights Act ( para 151 on RA 8371, 1977) predating the adoption of the UNDRIP. While this is so, indigenous peoples, especially women, in the Philippines have yet to really feel the presence of this law. Similarly, while the government has enacted a lot of laws and programs for the achievement of equality between men and women, indigenous women have yet to hear and fully understand these laws and programs in the light of equality and the advancement of their status. Poverty and limited access to proper information and basic services are some of the layers of vulnerability that has to be addressed. At the core of the fundamental right and freedom for indigenous peoples to own, manage sustain their lands, territories and resources which is basic for their survival their children’s while providing a source of security for indigenous women. just it is and and Indigenous women will remain invisible and marginalized and the advancement of their status impeded, as long as women are merely seen as the female gender and not recognized by their other identities. For indigenous women, this means substantive recognition of their identities as indigenous, therefore their collective right vis-à-vis their right as women as provided for by the CEDAW and other human rights instruments. In other words, these national laws and programs operationalizing the State’s obligations to women have to be effectively implemented in the light of other national laws/programs and practice that perpetuate gender violence and impede on the enjoyment and fulfillment of human and collective rights of indigenous women.   5  

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