Member of the State Duma Government Committee and new President of the Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Russian Far East, deputy Grigory Ledkov communicated the need to introduce rules for an international system of quality management standards. He announced the initiative at a round table meeting with members of Parliament from Russia, the Nordic countries and the Parliamentary Conference of the Baltic Sea in Syktyvkar on May 15th.

In his speech, the deputy of the Russian State Duma proposed the development of new international standards for corporations, which will serve to protect the interests of the small-numbered indigenous groups of the North. As Ledkov explained, large corporations that carry out the extraction of natural resources in territories occupied by native ethnic groups must already adhere to internationally accepted standards, such as the ISO 14000 (environmental management system), ISO 26000 (social responsibility), and SA 8000 (social responsibility management systems), which implicitly lay the foundations for the protection of the rights and interests of Native peoples from the North. The provisions of the ISO 9000 (quality management) may partly deal with this. Nonetheless, “they do not have regulations directly addressing the topic of small native ethnic groups,” he noted. “Because of this, we must create a new standard, even if it is supplementary to the ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility.”

We remind our readers that Ledkov was elected the new President of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) at the Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Russia in Salekhard, on March 29th.