Indigenous Spirituality in International Law: Between Misunderstanding and Recognition

Indigenous spirituality holds a paradoxical place in international law: formally acknowledged yet substantively unprotected. International human rights law has expanded to include Indigenous peoples' rights, but protection for Indigenous spirituality remains among the least developed, often reduced to religion or culture, neither of which fully captures it. This thesis argues that the gap is not accidental: the frameworks meant to protect Indigenous spirituality were built on the same Western legal tradition that historically suppressed it. Drawing on a decolonial approach, it asks to what extent international legal frameworks protect Indigenous spirituality and how translating it into Western categories affects that protection. The analysis proceeds in three stages. The first chapter shows why Indigenous spirituality is distinct from Western religion and why freedom of religion under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was not designed to capture its collective, land-based, relational dimensions. The second examines the broader legal landscape, including ILO Convention No. 169, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The third turns from diagnosis to possibility, asking whether the Court's interpretive tools and Indigenous legal knowledge could protect spirituality more directly and weighing the risks that would remain. The thesis concludes that international law offers protection in form more readily than in substance and that closing this gap requires confronting the colonial foundations of the international legal order. The tools needed already exist; what has been missing is the occasion and the willingness to use them.