One of the facets of the crisis in the Judiciary Power is the distance between the people and decision-making. Since the law exists to protect or to punish and does not entail rights, the people only knows the punitive face of Justice. However, under the new procedures established by the 1988 Constitution, rights were guaranteed not only including property or monetary claims but also collective and intangible rights such as life, the environment, culture, health, etc., and the collective right of all to public administration based on the rights of legality, morality, impersonality and disclosure.

It has been difficult for the Judiciary to decide on these matters. I don’t mean the individual judges, who many times understand the dimension of these rights, but the system as a whole, which is urged to reinstate the old interpretation every time a judge decides in favor of collective rights.

The dispute between land occupancy, which claims right to work and life, and the individual right of not using such land, for example, has turned the Judiciary into a hurdle against another collective right, more comprehensive than that of occupants and owners, which is the right of all to development with land reform. Few, and invariably revoked, are the court decisions which aim at the need to ensure the right to life and only afterwards amend to eventual property losses. As a rule, the rulings for eviction have been immediate, disregarding who the evicted are and where they will be taken; gravest yet, eviction is ruled prior to the assessment of expropriation possibilities.

In these disputes, efficiency has been the hallmark of the trials. However, suffice it to change the fulcrum of contradiction and this hallmark fades away. Ranchers invaded and expelled the Krenak indians from their territory in the Doce river valley. The suit proceeded for years at the Supreme Court, and Krenak won it almost five years ago but still haven’t been awarded their right. Time and again there is an unfulfilled formality or a missing stamp. Formalities, it must be said, which are never required of the ranchers, when they file suit for eviction of land which not always lawfully belongs to them.

In the case of the CVRD auction, sufficed that a few citizens, voicing the will of many, to interpose legal action to stop the sale, considered harmful to the public that the Executive, boasting a social-democrat discourse, called them antinational guerrillas of evil. Sufficed that the judges granted injunctions to stop the auction that the weight of the system fell on them, nullifying legitimacies.

On May 8, the Supreme Court issued a court order guaranteeing the CVRD auction. This is not the forum to discuss the merits of the legal issue, but let us only record the fear of collective rights that it reveals: "The Federal Constitution has opened broad spaces to encourage society’s monitoring of government’s actions (...) The exercise of citizenship became excessively intense, even (...) The uncommon manner by which each citizen uses and even abuses his right has created in this entire country the phenomenon of expectancy (...)" This excerpt from the ruling indicates the fear the system has of the intense exercise of citizenship.

How much citizenship will we have to exercise? How many times will we be called users and abusers of our own rights? We still have a long way to go, that is easy to see. But, since we go together, we can multiply our forces, because the condition for our survival as a species resides in the recognition and enforcement of these collective rights, social and environmental.