El enfoque extractivo del derecho ambiental y los desafíos del concepto de “pueblos indígenas”

Abstract

Indigenous Peoples Law is one of the branches of International Law that has had greater emphasis and development in recent years. Its connection with Environmental Law has been remarkable in the case-law product of human rights protection systems, especially in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights one. However, those advances face severe limitations due to the indeterminacy of the concept “indigenous peoples”. This legal indeterminacy, defended as necessary to avoid the exclusion of certain groups from that framework demonstrates a significant cost to the legal corpus effectiveness in the domestic legal order of States. In order to make clear that effect and in turn advocate for the establishment of a definition, we use existing knowledge in Environmental Law, specifically regarding investment and extractive projects. This approach will detect counterproductive effects generated by the lack of definition of the concept.