5
Insofar as possible, it accepts [the request to provide] medical
care and education in accordance with the States’ education and
health care plans.
In light of the above, the Court deems that, while the Community has no land,
given its special state of vulnerability and the impossibility of resorting to its traditional
subsistence mechanisms, the State must, immediately and on a regular basis, provide
sufficient drinking water for consumption and personal hygiene of the members of the
Community; it must provide regular medical care and appropriate medicine to ensure
the health of all individuals, especially boys, girls, the elderly and pregnant women,
including medicine and appropriate treatment for deworming all members of the
Community; delivery of sufficient food, with the appropriate variety and quality, for the
members of the Community to have minimum conditions for a decent life; to provide
latrines or any other type of appropriate sanitary facilities for effective and salubrious
biological waste management in the Community; and to provide sufficient bilingual
material for the educational requirements of the students at the school in the
Community’s current settlement.
Cultural identity has historical roots, and under the circumstances of the instant case
of the Yakye Axa indigenous Community, it is tied to ancestral lands. We must
emphasize that cultural identity is a component or is attached to the right to life lato
sensu; thus, if cultural identity suffers, the very right to life of the members of said
indigenous community also inevitable suffers. An expert opinion submitted to this
Court at the public hearing on 04.03.2005 asserted that the only ones to “humanize”
the region of El Chaco were the indigenous people themselves, with their culture,
their way of life, the way they themselves organized.
19. During their displacement, in recent years, from their “ancestral lands,” the
cultural identity, as well as the very right to life of the members of an indigenous
community such as the Yakye Axa, has seriously suffered. As the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights pointed out at the public hearing on 05.03.2005
before this Court –and this was not disputed by the State- as a consequence of the
aforementioned situation, when the children of the Yakye Axa Community are born,
they are predestined to disease, to lack of access to education, and to servitude. It
is our understanding that this clearly constitutes, in itself, a violation of the basic
right to life.
20.
In our opinion, the Court should have reasoned in greater depth on the basic
right to life, as it did in connection with the right to property (of ancestral lands).
Ultimately, the right to life is a non-derogable right under the American Convention,
while the right to property is not. In the instant case, the latter is especially
significant because it is directly related to full enjoyment of the right to life including
conditions for a decent life.
21.
This Court has pointed out in its jurisprudence constante (e.g., “Street
Children” (Villagrán Morales et al.), 1999; Bulacio case, 2003; Myrna Mack Chang
case, 2003; case of the “Juvenile Reeducation Institute”, 2004; Huilca Tecse case,
2005), that the right to life, whose full enjoyment is a prerequisite for enjoyment of
all the other rights, is basic in its nature, and it requires that the States take positive
steps to ensure conditions for a decent life. In the case of the Gómez Paquiyauri
Brothers (2004), the Court asserted that the States’ duty to respect the right to life
“has special aspects in the case of minors,” given their vulnerability and the special
protection that they require to “prevent situations that might lead, by action or by
omission,” to abridgment of said basic right (para. 124).