Although there is a majority in favor of the rights of indigenous peoples, Brazil’s Supreme Court intends to discuss legal formulas for cases involving landowners occupying areas claimed by indigenous peoples.
This Thursday, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) of Brazil reached the majority of votes necessary to recognize the right of indigenous peoples to the lands they historically occupy and reject a legal thesis that favored the powerful agricultural sector.
With three votes remaining, six of the eleven ministers have already spoken out against the so-called “temporary framework,” which proposes limiting these rights to the lands that indigenous peoples occupied on October 5, 1988, when the current Brazilian Constitution was promulgated. . .
This thesis, which the indigenous people consider unconstitutional because it does not recognize their rights over the lands they occupied long before 1988, and from which they were, in many cases, violently expelled, so far it has only been supported by two of the eleven judges.
Although there is already a majority in favor of the rights of indigenous peoples, the Supreme Federal Court intends to discuss legal formulas for the cases of many landowners who occupy areas claimed by indigenous peoples for decades. although they do it within a certain legality.
In these cases, these are people who paid for these lands to regional or municipal administrations, who sold them under the protection of numerous legal loopholes that existed before the 1988 Constitution, according to the judges.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes proposed an intermediate formula for resolving disputes, suggesting that, in these cases, the occupants of lands claimed by indigenous people should abandon them and be compensated, or that indigenous peoples should be compensated with other areas of equivalent size. .
The same issue is being debated in a Senate committee, which is analyzing a bill which requires the recognition of the “time frame”, despite being contrary to the conclusion that the Constitutional Court seems to have reached, which will only announce the result when the three judges who have not yet voted have given their verdict.
Source: Observadora
