The Indian Law Resource Center is an American Indian legal organization founded in 1978 to provide legal assistance without charge to Indian and other Native American nations and tribes in major matters relating to the protection of their right to exist, the survival of their cultures, society and governance, and protection of the environment. The Center provides assistance to Indian peoples in the United States and throughout the Americas using both domestic legal systems and international mechanisms. It is the first Indian legal organization to use international human rights mechanisms in order to advocate for the rights of Native American populations.

This past year the ILRC began its Human Rights Capacity Building Project, a new initiative to provide human rights training to tribal leaders in the United States. The purpose of the project is to enable Indian and Alaska Native leaders to use human rights and human rights procedures both domestically and in the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

The initiative contains six training sessions with Native American leaders throughout the country, with the objective of enabling the leaders and their tribes to use human rights in their advocacy and to address their concerns about human welfare, lands, treaty rights, and the survival of their cultures. The training includes distribution of materials on human rights, its mechanisms, and relation to domestic policy, and will be conducted by at least one attorney and advocate with human rights expertise. Through its Human Rights Capacity Building Project, ILRC hopes that more Native American leaders will participate effectively in the U.N. and OAS processes and that their respective governments will adopt the Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.