Founder and Executive Director
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Victoria Tauli-Corpuz was appointed the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples by the Human Rights Council in 2014 and served until April 2020.
She is an Indigenous leader from the Kankana-ey Igorot people of the Cordillera Region in the Philippines. As an Indigenous activist, she has worked for over three decades on building movement among Indigenous peoples and as an advocate for women's rights.
Tauli-Corpuz is the former chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2005–10) and has served as the chairperson-rapporteur of the Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Populations. As an Indigenous leader, she was actively engaged in drafting and adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. She has founded and managed various NGOs involved in raising social awareness, climate change and the advancement of Indigenous peoples' and women's rights, and she is a member of the United Nations Development Programme Civil Society Organizations Advisory Committee.
As the United Nations special rapporteur, Tauli-Corpuz provided expert testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Court on human and peoples’ rights, and prepared policy advice for the World Bank and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), among others.
