The Paraguayan government’s Institution for Indigenous Affairs of Paraguay (INDI) expressed its hope on Tuesday that the Paraguayan Supreme Court will reject an appeal from two German ranching companies that have been required to return 14,404 hectares of land to an Indigenous community.
Roughly 500 members of the Sawhoyamaxa community of the Exnet nation have been living alongside a highway in the Chaco region since they were displaced from their ancestral lands by cattle ranchers 23 years ago. In 2006, The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) ruled that the Sawhoyamaxa’s rights had been violated and ordered the Paraguayan government to return the land to the community within three years of the ruling.
Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes ultimately signed an expropriation law to return the lands to the Sawhoyamaxa on June 11, 2014 after it passed through the House and Senate after months of protests by the Exnet nation that the IACHR order had remained unfulfilled.
Two months after the law was signed, Heribert Roedel, president of both the German ranching companies Roswell S.A. and Kansol & Company S.A., petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the law on grounds of unconstitutionality. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Roedel’s claims, but recently accepted a second appeal from the company that focuses more specifically on article 3 of the new law. The argument put forward by the company states that the article is unconstitutional because the “constitutional provision does not provide an assessment of the amount of compensation carried out by the Ministry of Public Works and Communications.”
INDI has pointed out that the Paraguayan state would compensate the two companies with roughly $8 million and called the move by Roedel’s lawyers their “latest attempt to retain the property.”
