71 be issued in favor of the Yakye Axa Community. This territory constitutes the ancestral land of the Community. However, despite this explicit acknowledgment, the State has not ensured the right of the Yakye Axa Community to communal possession and ownership of their ancestral land; g) what the Yakye Axa Community is claiming is the ancestral land that historically belongs to it and on which the permanence and identity of the Community as such depends. In this regard, the Community has proven with its history (reflected in the testimony of its members and in the anthropological expert reports) and with the customs that guide the way it identifies its land, that the right to communal property existed before they were deprived of it, and that several families of the Community were forced to move to the Colony at “El Estribo”. Displacement of the Community to this Colony, due to extremely precarious and poor conditions, has not annulled that right. This is the aspect of the right to communal property whose protection is demanded in the framework of the American Convention, interpreted in light of ILO Convention No. 169 and the obligations recognized in Paraguay’s own Constitution, and this is the aspect of the right that has not been guaranteed by the State; h) the right to ancestral lands prevails, in this regard, in the framework of the American Convention and in Paraguayan constitutional order, over the right to private property. This right enjoys a preferential position vis-à-vis the right to property in general, in view of the set of rights that, in the specific situation of the Yakye Axa Community, are closely linked to guaranteeing said right: the right to life, the right to ethnic identity, the right to culture and to recreate it, the right to survive as an integrated indigenous Community; i) the impossibility of restoring the ancestral lands of the Yakye Axa Community due to “rational use” by the current owners of the land claimed is an erroneous argument. In the instant case, the State has applied to ancestral lands criteria for assessment of land use in non-indigenous rural agrarian law, despite having adopted ILO Convention No. 169 in its domestic legal system and depite the explicit reference to that Convention in Law No. 904/81, and j) the American Convention establishes guidelines to define permissible restrictions to rights, as follows: a) it must be a legally adopted measure, b) it must be necessary (and not only useful or reasonable) and c) it must be done to attain a legitimate objective in a democratic society in accordance with the provisions of the Convention. In the instant case, the decision reached is not a necessary measure because it is possible to financially compensate the current owners, it is not the least restrictive measure regarding rights, since sacrificing the Yakye Axa Community’s right to own its ancestral land to protect a specific concept of productivity of private property involves sacrificing the very existence of the Community, and it does not ensure the social interest in a democratic and pluralist society in the framework of the Convention. Pleadings of the State 122. With regard to Article 21 of the Convention, the State alleged that:

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