Time frame is ‘arbitrary and unconstitutional’ – 06/07/2023 – Cida Bento

Arbitrary, restrictive and unconstitutional. This is how the report by the Arns Commission on Human Rights classifies the time frame, the bill approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which would be considered as of this Wednesday (7) in the Senate.

The political and reactionary idea, transformed into a constitutional interpretation device, consolidates the thesis that the right of indigenous peoples to their traditional lands only applies to those that were effectively occupied by them on the date of enactment of the current Federal Constitution, October 1988. If approved, this project restricts the right to recognition of ownership of indigenous lands, extending its harmful effects to the quilombola populations as well, which is already happening.

One of the founders of the National Coordination of Quilombola Communities (Conaq), researcher Givânia Silva, confirms that the timeframe is not an issue that affects only the indigenous issue and recalls that the topic has already been under debate —still unfinished in the Federal Supreme Court, when the quilombolas had to prove that they were already on their lands in the act of Abolition, in 1888.

“If you start from this principle, you don’t consider the whole process of expropriation and expulsion from territories, you don’t consider how these communities were deterritorialized, nor the urbanization of many communities, which caused them to lose their territories”, says Givania.

In the researcher’s opinion, the time frame is a setback in a right that is consolidated and supported not only in the Constitution but also in international treaties, such as Convention 169 of the ILO. She adds that, voting on PL 490, it was as if Congress wanted to anticipate a decision that is about to be taken by the STF. A request for an examination by André Mendonça this Wednesday (7) postponed the judgment at the STF.

“It is unimaginable that the people of Brazil impose on indigenous peoples and quilombolas a time when they have to say: ‘From now on I am a subject and I can have rights, from now on, no’. Because that is accepting all the effects that the invasion of Brazil promoted on indigenous peoples and enslavement on black people”, comments the researcher.

The Arns Commission report draws attention to art. 231 of the Federal Constitution, which recognizes the original right of indigenous peoples to traditionally occupied lands and defines them as the set of areas used by indigenous peoples for housing, for their productive activities, for the preservation of the environmental resources necessary for their well-being and their physical and cultural reproduction, according to their uses, customs and traditions.

“There is no mention in the Federal Constitution of a certain date of possession to access an original right that must be recognized —and not constituted— by the Brazilian State.” The temporal framework thesis is already responsible for the paralysis and revision of demarcation processes across the country, directly impacting the lives of thousands of indigenous people who, having their fundamental right to territory violated, face a series of physical and symbolic violence, from murder to criminalization of its political, cultural and associative activities.

Joice Silva Bonfim and Carlos Eduardo Chaves, members of the Association of Lawyers for Rural Workers (AATR), inform that the thesis of the temporal framework has been used by federal judges of first instance to deny the right of property of quilombola communities to the lands that traditionally occupy, under the argument that they would also have to be occupying these lands on the exact date of the enactment of the Constitution in order to have the right to the territory.

Given this scenario, it is urgent to conceive and implement development models that reduce predatory greed for natural resources and that can include those who potentially have better conditions to contribute to the preservation of the Amazon. And these are, not coincidentally, the indigenous and quilombola populations.

_{This column had the collaboration of Flávio Carrança, from Cojira}

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.