Indigenous refugees, vulnerability and cultural erosion: international law of indigenous peoples’ and international refugee law’s possibilities and limits in the protection of indigenous cultural expressions related to traditional land and the native language

Resumo

The purpose of this article is to verify whether the legal frameworks of international refugee law and international law of indigenous peoples are able to protect indigenous groups in situations of refuge, guaranteeing their cultural specificities, particularly those related to the link with traditional land and indigenous language as cultural expressions and way of organizing reality. Thus, it seeks to investigate whether cultural protection norms that meet the specificities of the indigenous refugee are available in the referred legal frameworks. First, a concept of indigenous refugee is deduced from the definitions contained in international legal studies and instruments. Next, the obligatory density of the applicable rules is analysed, especially those found in soft law instruments. Then, it proceeds to the analysis of how the specific conditions of indigenous refugees affect their cultural expressions, seeking to identify the norms that could protect them. With regard to traditional land, it is assessed how uprooting and insertion, under precarious conditions, in urban contexts, during the refuge situation, the process of its application, threatens its original culture. As for language, it is investigated how the situation of refuge to which the indigenous person is subjugated can lead to a process of linguistic cultural erosion and even the extinction of the language in the host State. It is concluded that, despite the existence of norms that offer some type of protection, they are insufficient to guarantee the preservation of cultural expressions of indigenous refugees due to the deep vulnerability of such condition.