INDIGENOUS RECOGNITION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: THEORETICAL OBSERVATIONS

According to Kelsen, by the legal act of recognition the recognized community is brought into legal existence in relation to the recognizing [S]tate, and thereby international law becomes applicable to the relations between these SJtates. Nor does it authorize indigenous people to challenge the international legal validity of the sovereign power to which they are subject on the basis of its morally suspect origins.160 But, international indigenous rights mitigate some of the adverse consequences of how international law validates morally suspect colonization projects that participated in the production of the existing distribution of sovereign power.