A lopsided majority of Brazil's Supreme Court ruled Thursday, September 21, against an effort to restrict native peoples' rights to protected reservations on their ancestral lands, in a win for Indigenous activists and climate campaigners.
Indigenous leaders in bright feather headdresses and body paint exploded in celebration outside the high court building in Brasilia as Justice Luiz Fux became the sixth on the 11-member court to side with the native plaintiffs in the landmark case, giving them victory.
The judges voted one by one and in the end, the tally was a 9-2 win for Indigenous people opposed to the restriction.
"Justice is on the side of Indigenous peoples," said Joenia Wapichana, the head of the government's Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI. "Today is a day to celebrate the death of the 'time-frame argument.'"
The so-called "time-frame argument" at the center of the case held that Indigenous peoples should not have the right to protected reservations on lands where they were not present in 1988 when the country's current constitution was ratified.
The plaintiffs argued that violated their rights, given that many native groups were forced from their ancestral lands, including during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the 1960s to 1980s.
Indigenous activists had dubbed the case the "trial of the century."
After Fux's ruling, Justice Carmen Lucia also sided with the majority, as did two more judges, bringing the final vote to 9-2. "Brazilian society has an impossible debt to pay to native peoples," Lucia said in her ruling.
The only two justices to rule in favor of the "time-frame argument" so far were appointed by former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), who fulfilled his vow while in office not to create "one more centimeter" of protected Indigenous reservations in Brazil. Bolsonaro is an ally of Brazil's powerful agribusiness lobby, which backed the "time-frame" limitation.
He presided over a surge in destruction in the Brazilian Amazon during his presidency when average annual deforestation increased by more than 75% from the previous decade.
Environmentalists had joined Indigenous activists in pressing for the court to reject the time-frame argument. Numerous studies have found protected Indigenous reservations are one of the best ways to fight deforestation and, with it, climate change.