Direito em Movimento - Volume 16 - Número 2 - 2º semestre/2018

101 Direito em Movimento, Rio de Janeiro, v. 16 - n. 2, p. 72-105, 2º sem. 2018 ARTIGOS 10. CONCLUSIONS 1.The case of the Awas Tingni indigenous community against Nica- ragua is an important leading case for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It represented a tipping point , a maneuver by jurisprudence on in- digenous rights, and marked the passage of a more timid and conservative posture to juridical-political activism in the recognition of human rights under a multicultural perspective. 2. This jurisprudential evolution constructed a theory of indigenous law for the Earth and unleashed an ontologically just reprieve from the heart of the Inter-American System of human rights protection: these an- cestral populations had lived through a fragile situation, historically sub- mitted to processes of domination, exploitation and discrimination. 3. In the American Convention on Human Rights there is no mecha- nism for indigenous law with respect to land ownership. The Court, upon accepting the incompleteness of the norm, admitted that this was insuf- ficient to guarantee the juridical safety of the natives and parted towards the combination of hermeneutic criteria which, in practice, did away with the opposition between common law and civil law , this being an important advance, since both of them have served juridical Western tradition. 4. The Inter-American Court valued hermeneutics with a view to Justice. The judges passed through the totality of law through the inter- pretation of the protection of human rights and handed in a constructive interpretation to the Convention. 5. Native ownership on lands which they traditionally occupy is quite a story of a subject in contemporary law, which crosses over juridical-cons- titutional limits, be it for involving anthropological and interdisciplinary questions, be it for limiting economic advantage – normally the predatory kind – in certain regions. The interests involved in the process of recog- nition and demarcation of indigenous lands are multiple, almost always characterized by the conflict between miners, logging companies, rural pro- duction, environmentalists and traditional populations.