During the final stages of the negotiations on access and benefit sharing in the rooms on the upper floor of the Convention Center in Nagoya in 2010, the term "nondiscrimination" was a controversial issue in the context of compliance. The Canadian delegation insisted on including this word in the text, but compromised after many rounds of argument, allowing the term to be deleted. Somewhat later, in the same room, representatives of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (ILCs - included at the table in the "Vienna+ setting" of these negotiations) reintroduced the term, garnering immediate support from Canada.There are, however, two distinct legal contexts in which the term "non-discriminatory" appears. It can be assumed that Canada's initial interventions used it in the trade context, while the ILCs certainly used it in the human rights context, given growing public awareness that their human rights have been violated so often in the past, especially since the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the UN General Assembly, September 2007. This note asks what exactly Canada was supporting, when it supported the ILCs're-insertion of the term - the trade context or the human rights context?
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