The Ma’ohi Protestant Church has warned that a United States proposal to abolish the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation would silence colonised peoples seeking self-determination.
In a statement, the church said it supported the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) in opposing the proposal raised by the United States before the UN Fourth Committee on 15 October.
The church said abolishing the Special Committee on Decolonization, also known as the C-24, would remove a key forum for colonised peoples to raise their concerns.
“To close the one forum where colonised peoples are heard would not end colonialism. It would end only the hearing,” said church president Reverend François Pihataae, who signed the statement.
Pihataae called on all UN member states, particularly Pacific countries, to support the continuation of the C-24’s mandate and the work of the Fourth Committee.
He said the right of the Ma’ohi people of French Polynesia to determine their own future remained central to the church’s position.
“Their right to decide their own future is no favour granted by the powerful. It belongs to them because every human being bears the image of God, and no authority on earth may take it away,” he said.
The church said it had supported the re-inscription of French Polynesia, known as Ma’ohi Nui, on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories in 2012, alongside the PCC.
Since 2018, it has also advocated for the Ma’ohi people before the C-24 and the Fourth Committee in New York, and before the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva in October 2024.
The church said electoral contests and political disputes had not changed its position on the right to self-determination.
It urged countries to approach decolonisation through justice rather than abandon the process, warning that abolishing the committee could leave colonised peoples without a forum to be heard.
“We pray that the nations will be guided by justice rather than by weariness, and that no people will be sent away unheard,” Pihataae said.
