Plenary of the Chamber of Deputies.| Photo: Pablo Valadares/Chamber of Deputies.

The Federal Public Defender’s Office (DPU) defended, in a technical note, the complete rejection of the bill on the time frame for the demarcation of indigenous lands (PL 490/2007). The document was sent by the acting Federal Public Defender, Fernando Mauro Junior, to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), last Friday (26).

Last week, the Chamber approved the urgency regime for processing the proposal. With this, the text will not need to go through committees and will be analyzed directly in plenary. According to Lira, the matter can be discussed this Tuesday (30). For the DPU, approval of the project “would represent a serious violation of human rights, contrary to the duties of the Brazilian State explicit in the UN Convention” and other international provisions.

In a note, the DPU states that “the thesis of the temporal framework disregards the original character of the indigenous territorial rights currently recognized by the Federal Constitution of 1988”. For the defenders who signed the document, “the current Constitution cannot be used as a reference for the indigenous occupation, which has parameters different from the requirements of possession of civil law”.

The technical note is signed by the coordinators of the Indigenous Communities Working Group, federal public defender Wagner Wille Nascimento Vaz and federal public defender Daniele de Souza Osório, and by the general secretary of institutional articulation of the DPU, Gabriel Travassos, among others.