Brazilian Supreme Court judge suspends trial over indigenous rights to ‘think’

This content was published on Jun 7, 2023 – 19:44
June 07, 2023 – 19:44

Brasilia, June 7 (EFE). – A judge of Brazil’s Supreme Court on Wednesday left a trial hearing on the “ancestral rights” of indigenous peoples to land, citing the need for “further reflection”. A very complex case.

Judge Andrés Mendonça asked to preside over the court for a longer period, to be determined later, to analyze “a very complex and relevant case due to its historical and legal issues.”

Mendonça asked for that time as soon as Justice Alexandre de Moraes proposed to the court a “middle path” to the absolute rejection of the so-called “temporary framework”, which recognizes only those indigenous lands occupied by indigenous peoples as of October 5, 1988 when the current constitution was promulgated.

With one vote against and one in favor of this thesis, Moraes said that the court, as a constitutional court, could not accept this “temporary framework”, but it also could not “ignore” the rights of the many settlers who had settled “in good faith”. On lands claimed by indigenous peoples and encouraged by the state itself in the past.

Although Moraes voted against the “temporary framework”, he asserted that justice “cannot turn a blind eye to the settlers who have labored their lands for more than 100 years, protected by the public authority and today they are already in the third or fourth generation.”

The judge suggested various alternatives to overcome these issues.

among them, the compensation of landowners who may eventually be withdrawn from the lands they occupy or the possibility of the natives accepting from the State, as each case may be, other areas equal in surface to those to which they claim.

De Morais stressed that in no way could such compensation be considered for settlers who forcibly settled indigenous lands.

At stake in the trial are the fate of hundreds of lands claimed by indigenous peoples, who in recent days have mobilized in almost all parts of the country to defend what they consider to be their “ancestral rights”.

In fact, about 50 representatives of different ethnic groups were in the plenary session of the Court, accompanied by Sonia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples, a portfolio created by the government of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva on January 1.

The case reached the Supreme Court from the lower courts and through a lawsuit brought by the state against a secondary court ruling that recognized a public body in the southern state of Santa Catarina as the owner of some land.

Occupied for centuries by the Xokleng, Guaraní and Kaingang ethnic groups, these areas were forcibly evicted in the middle of the last century, ending up in the hands of the Fundación para el Amparo Tecnológico de Santa Catarina, favored by the current sentence under discussion by the Supreme Court.

This ruling, based on the concept of a “temporary framework”, asserted that in October 1988 those lands were in the possession of that Santa Catarina Authority and ignored that, beginning in 1996, some of those settlements had been reclaimed by the indigenous people. EFE

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