Brazil high court Forest Code ruling largely bad for environment, Amazon: NGOs

The Amazon rainforest canopy. Photo by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay In what many consider Brazil’s most important ruling ever about the environment, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected, by a tight vote of 6 to 5, some of the most important charges of “unconstitutionality” brought against the New Forest Code – the Law of Native Protection (12.651/2012). The resulting decision revokes the more environmentally friendly Forest Code passed in 1965 under the military government then in power in Brazil, and maintains much of the New Forest Code, passed in 2012 by a Congress under the powerful influence of the bancada ruralista, Brazil’s agribusiness lobby. The voting by the eleven ministers in the Supreme Court was staggered over several weeks. Until the eleventh minister, Celso de Mello, cast his votes yesterday, voting on some of the most important of the 23 accusations of unconstitutionality made against the New Forest Code was tied, with five votes for and five against. In the end, 18 of the 23 charges of unconstitutionality were rejected. Some important issues were decided by a comfortable majority before yesterday’s vote, and some decisions favorable to the environment were made. But on key issues where voting was tied as of Thursday, Celso de Mello sided with those Supreme Court justices endorsing the constitutionality of the New Forest Code. As a result of this final ruling, the high court has now endorsed an amnesty given to landowners who had illegally cleared their so-called Legal Reserve (the part of their…

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