27/11/2025
Yesterday early hours we had the privilege to present to UN Committee on Eliminating Racial Discrimination (CERD). We thank the Human Rights Council and our fellow NGOs for this opportunity, gathered through our work over the past years.
Today, we present our briefing paper:
“ℍ𝕦𝕞𝕒𝕟 ℝ𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕤 𝕍𝕚𝕠𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕝𝕠𝕓𝕒𝕝 𝕄𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕔 𝕀𝕟𝕕𝕦𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕪 – ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕥𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕀𝕟𝕕𝕚𝕘𝕖𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕤 𝕄𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕔.”
ᴡʜʏ ᴡᴇ ᴡʀᴏᴛᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴘᴀᴘᴇʀ
Mahi Moana entered this work through lived experience and community mandate. For years we have supported Indigenous artists and families facing repeated harm:
• Loss of ownership of their songs and rights
• Unpaid royalties across decades
• Recordings taken offshore into restricted archives
• Traditional instruments copied or misrepresented
• Sacred songs reused online without consent
• Elders’ knowledge controlled by institutions
• Artists trapped in lifetime contracts
• Families unable to navigate rights after artists passed away
This list goes on.
Across our workshops and talanoa in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, we witnessed the same pattern: the exploitation was not isolated — it was structural, global, and accelerating.
ᴡʜʏ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴍᴀᴛᴛᴇʀꜱ
For Indigenous peoples, music is not merely entertainment — it is genealogy, ceremony, identity, and ancestral memory.
Yet for more than a century, colonial systems extracted, suppressed, and controlled our music. Those systems remain embedded in the global industry today.
In Aotearoa, Te Tiriti o Waitangi affirms Māori tino rangatiratanga over their taonga, including cultural expressions and traditional knowledge. The Crown’s obligations of protection, partnership, and participation require safeguarding Māori authority over their cultural heritage.
But the current music industry — dominated by corporations, digital platforms, AI companies, and copyright systems — does not recognise collective ownership, cultural protocol, or sacred knowledge.
This results in ongoing violations of UNDRIP, ICESCR, ILO 169, and breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
This is not a technical failure —it is racism.
When a global system continually privileges dominant frameworks, Western authorship, Western profit, and Western definitions of “creativity,” while denying Indigenous peoples control over their own cultural identity —
that is structural racism.
It is the continuation of colonial hierarchies in a digital age.
It is cultural erasure repackaged as industry practice.
This is digital colonisation, and it is growing at unprecedented scale.
ᴡʜʏ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴍᴏᴍᴇɴᴛ ɪꜱ ᴄʀɪᴛɪᴄᴀʟ
For the first time, major shifts are converging:
• Hard industry learnings revealing long-standing harm
• A global shift toward Indigenous storytelling
• Indigenous origin stories finally being told by our own peoples
• Rapid AI expansion and copyright law reform
Music has become a global language, but in unregulated digital spaces it can also be weaponised — used to distort identity, imitate sacred sounds, or generate artificial versions of our culture without context, consent, or community authority.
We stand at a crossroads.
We call on Member States to create international protections, regulate AI, uphold free, prior, and informed consent, and recognise Indigenous authority over cultural expressions and origin stories.
Malo ‘aupito, fa’afetai tele lava, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
