- Brazil’s Supreme Court has sworn in Flávio Dino, the first justice of the country’s highest court with an Amazonian background in almost 20 years.
- Amazonian states have gone largely unrepresented at the top of the Brazilian judicial system for decades, a political distortion that has spurred calls for reform.
- Federal courts are of special interest in the Amazon because illegal activity in the region tends to be intertwined with environmental, Indigenous, mining and land reform issues — all of which fall under federal jurisdiction.
- The lack of federal courts of appeal in the Amazon and the large distances that people have to travel to access justice have long been a common complaint among Amazonian lawyers, public defenders, judges and politicians.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has sworn in its first justice with an Amazonian background in almost 20 years. Flávio Dino de Castro e Costa, a former federal judge who served as a governor and a senator for the state of Maranhão and as minister of justice for the past year, took office on Feb. 22.
A close ally of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dino has stressed his Amazonian origins: Maranhão is one of the states that make up Brazil’s Legal Amazon region; another is Amazonas, where Dino traces his father’s side of the family. “I consider myself a man from the Amazonian region,” he told senators during his confirmation hearing in November 2023.
His appointment to Brazil’s highest court is unusual. Historically, the country’s nine Amazonian states have gone virtually unrepresented at the top of the Brazilian judiciary. In its 134 years, the Supreme Court has had only two justices born in the Amazon.
It’s a similar story for the Superior Court of Justice, the highest appeals court in Brazil; only four judges from the Amazon region have served on that court since 1988.
Experts, activists, Indigenous advocates and lawyers from Amazonian states have long pushed for a reform of the federal court system in Brazil. Their aim is to boost their representation in these tribunals, which are of special interest for the Amazon: much of the illegal activity in the region is intertwined with environmental, Indigenous, mining and land reform issues — all of which fall under federal jurisdiction.
At present, cases of illegal logging, land grabbing, and invasions of Indigenous lands that find their way before the courts are usually decided by judges with little or no experience of living in the Amazon. Critics say these judges are often unfamiliar with the intricate mechanisms of crime and abuse in the rainforest. Or worse, they live in regions dominated by agribusiness culture and are often lenient with the destruction wrought by the soy and beef industries in the Amazon.
Mauricio Terena, a lawyer with the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), one of the main Indigenous advocacy groups in the country, says better representation of Amazonian states at the highest levels of the Brazilian judiciary could improve native peoples’ representation. A current snapshot of the judiciary, he says, reflects “a heterosexual, white, male institution. If it changed, it could also impact the way people see justice.”
The municipality of Lábrea in Amazonas state, is an example of how the near-absence of federal justice in the region allows problems to fester.
Lábrea spans 6.8 million hectares (16.8 million acres), an area nearly the size of Ireland, with a population at about 47,700, less than a hundredth that of the Emerald Isle’s. The sole road connecting Lábrea to the rest of Brazil is the BR-230, the Trans-Amazonian Highway, but it’s easier to get there by air or on Ituxi or Iquiri rivers.
Amid this extreme remoteness, Lábrea has become one of the most dangerous places in Brazil. Land disputes abound, as do the practices of illegal logging and deforestation, while gunmen and smugglers act with brazen impunity. A frequent target of the armed gangs in Lábrea is the Marielle Franco settlement.
Established on government-held land about a decade ago by 260 families of campesinos and farmworkers, the community named itself after a socialist city councilor from Rio de Janeiro. Marielle Franco, an outspoken critic of police violence and extrajudicial killings, was killed along with her driver by gunmen in March 2018. Several people have currently been charged or are standing trial for the murders, including two former police officers.
In a cruel twist, leaders of the Lábrea settlement named after her have suffered at least three attempted killings. Although the incidents remain unsolved, many in Lábrea blame local landowners seeking to take the land.
The land on which the Marielle Franco settlement sits is claimed to be owned by INCRA, Brazil’s federal agency for land reform. The case has therefore come under the purview of a federal court, albeit only recently. Supporters of the community say they hope this higher profile will act as a guarantee of the civil rights and prerogatives of the Lábrea settlers. Nevertheless, it also underscores the inequities of the Brazilian justice system, where people living in the Amazonian region, especially the poor, face massive obstacles to accessing federal courts. In this case, hearings have been scheduled in Manaus, the Amazonas state capital, 850 kilometers (530 miles) from Lábrea.
“Federal justice is mostly absent in the interior of the Amazonas,” Amanda Farias, a state public defender in Lábrea, told Mongabay. “Parties from remote areas are often unable even to check process entries.” In some cases, the state public defender’s office provides legal assistance to parties in federal courts, despite not being legally allowed to do so.
Ingrid Godinho Dodô, a lawyer and general secretary of the Constitutional Law Commission of the Bar Association of Brazil in Amazonas, has experienced the harsh consequences of this lack of access.
“Only people who live here and know local problems can help with their experience,” she told Mongabay. “Only people who live or have worked in the field know the pains and difficulties to bring fast and efficient justice to the public.”
Dodô, a proponent of court reform, said remote places, some as far as a 48-hour boat trip from the nearest large city, must be put on the priority list for assurance of access to legal services.
Brazil’s regional federal appeals courts are split up into six circuits. TRF-1, which includes the Amazonian region, has jurisdiction over 13 of Brazil’s 27 states, covering an area that amounts to 73% of the country’s territory, almost 80% of all the border areas, and almost a third of the Brazilian population.
Few courts in the largest Amazonian state
The TRF-1 circuit has courts in just three cities in Amazonas, a state the size of Mongolia and the largest in Brazil.
The courts in the municipalities of Tefé and Tabatinga were closed for much of the past decade, sparking multiple protests by local communities demanding that they be revived. The community pressure prevailed, and the courts were reestablished in both municipalities, albeit with a lowering of the status of Tefé’s court.
As of December 2022, the ratio of inhabitants per federal court of appeal in Amazonas was nearly 341,000:1, among the highest in Brazil, alongside the states of Pará and Maranhão, both also in the Amazon.
To reduce these inequalities, the National Council of Justice (NCJ), an independent government watchdog for the judiciary, launched for the first time in July 2023 an initiative called Cooperative Itinerant Justice in the Legal Amazon, in the municipality of São Félix do Xingu, in Pará state. For four days, officials from both the judicial and executive branches of government participated in a legal clinic attending to local people’s labor, pensions, land, environmental and medical issues.
In the mission report for the legal clinic, published in September, officials acknowledged that “in the Legal Amazon, there are many sites not reached by state powers [including the judiciary] and where are located the worst human development indexes in the country, land disputes and crime above the national average, besides the difficult physical access to some places.” The National Council of Justice plans to hold at least two more legal clinics this year.
For officials, lawyers and judges, the poor penetration of federal justice in the Amazonian region and the huge distances between court locations are to blame for the high turnover of judges. “Magistrates are interested in acting in states nearer to the TRF-1 [headquarters], as it coincides with their aspirations for career ascension,” said Diogo Condurú, a lawyer in Pará. The seat of the TRF-1 circuit is Brasília, the nation’s capital. That’s where appeals for federal lawsuits in the Amazonian states end up.
Over time, this state of affairs has tended to produce low-quality decisions that can even deepen or consolidate conflicts, experts say. One possible solution, Condurú said, would be to reform the career path of judges to encourage them to stay close to at-risk communities.
In 2002, the Brazilian Senate passed a constitutional amendment calling for the creation of four new TRF circuits. One of them, TRF-9, would cover four Amazonian states currently under TRF-1 — Acre, Amazonas, Rondônia and Roraima — ensuring better access to the legal system for residents of those states.
For the next 11 years, however, the proposed amendment never made it to the floor of the lower House, the Chamber of Deputies. When the Chamber did finally pass it in June 2013, it was challenged at the Supreme Court by an association of federal prosecutors. The chief justice at the time, Joaquim Barbosa, the first Afro-Brazilian to serve on the court, found in favor of the prosecutors’ association, and the amendment remains in limbo to this day, pending a decision by the other Supreme Court justices.
Observers of Brazil’s judicial system trace the problem to the legacy political interests that created the judiciary after the fall of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship. The civilian Constitution that emerged in 1988 from that transition set out the blueprint for the court system as it stands today. When it came to dividing jurisdictions, representatives sought to please then-president José Sarney, from Maranhão, who considered that regional matters would be better served in a court of appeals located in the federal capital. Representatives of several other states pushed in the same direction.
The result today is that the people of the Amazonian region have remained largely underserved by the federal court system for decades. “The Amazonian region is the only one in Brazil deprived of a court of appeals [headquartered] in the region,” said Jônatas Andrade, a judge with the regional labor court in Pará.
Besides the long distances to get to a court, Amazonians are also hugely underrepresented in judges’ seats. “Criteria for high court nominations are often subject to considerations of a racial and gender nature,” Sywan Peixoto Silva Neto, a lawyer from Amazonas who specializes in federal cases and moved to Brasília to be near TRF-1, told Mongabay. “There is even goodwill in the face of nominees from the Northeast [a historically poor and underdeveloped Brazilian region]. We don’t see a similar concern in the case of candidates from the North [which covers much of the Legal Amazon],” he said.
Banner image: Inauguration of minister Flávio Dino as minister of the STF. Image by Fellipe Sampaio/SCO/STF.
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