Dr. Paul Maas Risenhoover of the Robin Hood International Human Rights Legal Defense Fund petitioned the ICJ as “trustee of the native Chamorros, Carolinians and Formosan islander Indians.”
ICJ must first determine if it has jurisdiction before the petition can proceed.
Risenhoover separately filed a 276-page case in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over what he described as America’s unfair treatment of the CNMI’s indigenous people — Chamorro and Carolinian.
Local radio talk show host Glenn H. Manglona, in an e-mail said the lawsuit was filed on behalf of the National Chamorro Association of the Mariana Islands, of which he is the president.
In his 24-page petition to the ICJ, Risenhoover said the Covenant was meant to preserve the native Indian nationality of the indigenous people but the Covenant negotiators failed to explain this clearly, thus, “no one in the CNMI appears to have elected to remain an Indian under the Covenant.”
“The Covenant’s nationality provisions therefore extinguished the traditional Indian nationality of the Chamorros and Carolinian islanders in the Northern Mariana Islands, an act of genocide by the U.S. for which this court should order restoration of our native Indian nationality,” Risenhoover said.
He said the recent federalization of local immigration inflicted further harm on the indigenous people of the CNMI as the islands’ self-government became “meaningless.”
He also believes that CNMI, Puerto Rico and Guam, which are all part of the U.S., should be allowed to join the U.N. as freely associated states.
