Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz is a development consultant and an international indigenous activist of Kankana-ey Igorot ethnicity. On 2 June 2014, she assumed responsibilities as the third UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. As UN special rapporteur, she is tasked to investigate alleged violations of indigenous peoples rights and promote the implementation of international standards concerning the rights of indigenous peoples.
She is the indigenous and gender adviser to the Third World Network, a member of United Nations Development Programme Civil Society Organizations Advisory Committee and a member of the World Future Council.
She was the first recipient of the Gabriela Silang Award, conferred in 2009 by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.
Tauli-Corpuz has served as chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and was the rapporteur for the Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Populations.Background
She graduated from the Philippine Science High School in Diliman, Quezon City in 1969. She completed her nursing degree at the UP College of Nursing, University of the Philippines Manila in 1976.
As an activist, she helped organize indigenous peoples on the community level to fight against the projects of then President Ferdinand Marcos. The indigenous peoples she organized helped stop the Chico River Hydroelectric Dam project, which would have inundated traditional villages, and the logging operations of Cellophil Resources Corporation on ancestral lands.
