Section Twenty-five of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the first section under the heading "General" in the Charter, and like other sections within the "General" sphere, it aids in the interpretation of rights elsewhere in the Charter. While section 25 is also the Charter section that deals most directly with Aboriginal peoples in Canada, it does not create or constitutionalize rights for them.

The Charter is a part of the larger Constitution Act, 1982. Aboriginal rights, including treaty rights, receive more direct constitutional protection under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

Under the heading "General," the section reads:

In other words, the Charter must be enforced in a way that does not diminish Aboriginal rights. As the Court of Appeal for Ontario held in R. v. Agawa (1988), the section "confers no new rights," but instead "shields" old ones.

This is a stronger recognition for non-Charter rights than section 26's requirement that the Charter cannot be interpreted to deny that non-Charter rights exist, as section 25 specifically states that Aboriginal rights will not only continue to exist but also cannot be derogated by the Charter itself. The distinction came about during the negotiations of the Charter. Section 25's content did not appear in the first version of the Charter, in October 1980, but the original version of what later became section 26 did say that the existence of Aboriginal rights could not be denied. This sparked dramatic protests among Aboriginals, who viewed the proposed constitutional amendments as an insufficient protection of their rights. This persisted until some of their leaders, the National Indian Brotherhood, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and the Native Council of Canada (now the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples), were appeased by the addition of sections 25 and 35 to the Constitution Act, 1982.

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