Finally, in Chapter 12, Caroline Dommen concludes our discussion by addressing how human rights impact assessments can contribute to ensuring that Indigenous rights are upheld in international trade agreements. She considers how explicit reference to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, may improve human rights impact assessments as well as trade agreements, from both legal and policy perspectives. There is now a substantial body of impact assessments of actual or likely impacts of trade and investment agreements on human rights, including on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her chapter describes the role and the objectives of impact assessment, explaining the particular advantages of human rights-based impact assessment. It draws on recommendations of UN human rights mechanisms and analysis of completed impact assessments of trade agreements to present some of the main principles of human rights law that are relevant in the trade policy context, and how these impose legal obligations on states to carry out human rights impact assessments prior to adopting new trade agreements.

This chapter considers the question of patents and genetic resources (GR), as currently being discussed in various international fora, in the light of the function of intellectual property. In particular, the chapter supports the proposal by developing countries, to require, in an international legal instrument, mandatory disclosure of the origin of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge (TK) in patent applications, with a view to realising in an effective way fair and equitable benefits sharing as required by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This proposal has also been supported by the Vatican (Holy See) on the basis of Catholic social teaching, which this chapter discusses in condensed form. Mandatory disclosure would provide a structural mechanism to ensure that the fruits of exploitation of TK/GR benefit indigenous community, who are often poor and whose living habitats and way of life are often under threat.