Legal Protection/ Political Participation

Posted by By admin at 22 May, at 02 : 42 AM Print

In the area of legal and democratic projects we are currently working on two projects:

The first project “INDIGENOUS QUECHUA COMMUNITIES TAKE PART IN LOCAL POLITICS“ works, as its name suggests, for a better political participation of the quechua-speaking indigenous communities from the districts Acostambo and Pazos. (See map – Pazos Acostambo) In these two districts the indigenous are prevented from participating in the local politics.
Reasons for this are, firstly, a lack of legal knowledgs in the communities, for example in relation to the origin and composition of a budget for their respective district and furthermore the ignorance of their own possibilities for participation in political decisions of their district and local government.
Therefore the indigenous communities are excluded from any participation and can neither speak out nor participate in the deciding process or the development of budgets. In this way the communities are often unable to benefit from state resources and democracy is virtually non-existent. The administrative boards often do not take serious the wishes of the indigenous people or do not follow them, or rather want to ignore the democratic way of a majority decision-making process. Thus the communities often do not benefit in any way from their statutory duties, because they are used in other ways, as they would conform to their needs.
To prevent this, we want to achieve an organized participation of communities in the process of developing and implementing the budget and each of the measures contained therein.
The legal basis for our work is the article 197 ° of the Peruvian Constitution, which guarantee the participation of all residents of a local district to questions of its development.

Our objectives in detail are:
To organize women and men, so that together they can represent their interests and thus can help determine the budget. Women and men sould develope together a development plan for their community / their district. To allow women and men to participate in the process of the budget-development.

Our second Project is called “RECOGNITION OF THE INDIGENOUS, QUECHUA-SPEAKING COMMUNITIES AS LEGAL ENTITIES” in this sense we also work for “LEGAL DEFENSE OF THEIR TERRITORIES”
In this project we are struggling with the problem that some quechua-speaking peasant communities have no legal existence in front of the state, its democratic voice has no weight, and strangers often appropriate territorial possession from the affected communities without having to fear legal prosecution. This is usually caused by legal ignorance while not existing in the public and national registers. Therefore it is of course no question that we want to achieve that communities in the districts of Colcabamba, Daniel Hernandez, Acraquia, and Pazos Acostambo are included in the state registers.
We want to achieve that educating the members of our communities about the legal situation and helping them during the process of registering their communities. Subsequently the members and presidents of the various communities will participate in the legislature and thus have the opportunity to protect their territories from foreign acquisition.

THE TEAM