Access to Justice, Indigenous Rights and Citizenship

Colonialism resulted in a historical process of invisibility of indigenous people, which materialized in the social, political, economic and legal fields. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution marked the country's redemocratization process and recognized the rights of indigenous people; however, these rights lack enforcement. Rights considered fundamental, such as access to education, social security or political rights, often cannot be exercised due to the lack of basic documents, such as official civil registration. In order to close this “gap” and create effective mechanisms that guarantee full citizenship to indigenous people within the state framework, the Judiciary, in partnership with civil society entities, established the legislative basis for the issuance of official documents, respecting the cultural and identity aspects of these Brazilians. In this sense, the research will reflect on the leading role of the Judiciary in promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, in particular, the judicial policy called Itinerant Justice, mobile justice, which takes the services provided by the Judiciary to the least accessible places and to the most vulnerable people. This public judicial policy aims to bring them closer to legal institutions, to make the justice system more democratic, effective and transformative of new social realities. It is a possibility of access to justice and the promotion of human rights, through an initiative that has a theoretical basis structured in the field of an epistemology of the South. Through Itinerant Justice, indigenous ethnic groups now have access to the entire series of documents inherent to full state citizenship, thus integrating indigenous people as prominent interlocutors in the formulation of public policies that can, in fact, reduce social inequalities and allow the ancestral owners of the land to effectively participate in the reconstruction of a new path of inclusion.