Two of Brazil’s most influential and well-known Indigenous leaders filed international lawsuits this week against the country’s leaders, alleging right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies towards Indigenous and tribal peoples. Amazon rainforest is a crime against humanity.

Commander of the Raoni Metuktire, Leader of the Kayapo Tribe, and Chairman of the Almir Tribe Narayamoga Surui, Leader of the Paiter Surui Tribe, filed a lawsuit at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, Friday.

The lawsuit points to increased rates of deforestation in the Amazon, increased killings of Indigenous Brazilian leaders, and the Bolsonaro government’s efforts to strip protection of rainforests and tribal lands, policies that Indigenous leaders say aim to “exploit Amazon’s natural resources and undermine indigenous peoples’ rights.” to promote the industry. ”

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was already increasing when Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, but that figure continues to soar, and record a fire outbreak in the region over the past two years has drawn global attention to Bolsonaro’s efforts roll back environmental protection and revamp Brazil’s environmental regulatory agency. More than 2.7 million acres of the Amazon removed in 2020, according to Brazilian government data, the highest total in 12 years.

A longtime human rights and environmental activist, Chief Raoni has emerged as the leader of the Indigenous resistance against Bolsonaro, who has been warned by tribal leaders of threatening their people with genocide. Raoni, who is 89 years old tested positive for COVID-19 in August (months after Indigenous leaders argued that the Bolsonaro government’s sluggish response to the pandemic was leaving them very vulnerable), last year said that Bolsonaro worst president of the 24 Brazilian leaders who have served during his lifetime.

The lawsuit does not warrant an investigation into Bolsonaro but calls for the court’s prosecutor to conduct an investigation into his claim. It will likely take weeks before a court makes a decision on whether an investigation is justified.

If the ICC follows through, the complaint against Bolsonaro could have an impact far beyond Brazil: The lawyers behind the case say it could push widespread environmental damage – or ecocide – onto the list of crimes the ICC recognizes as prosecutable under international law.

William Bourdon, the French lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of Chief Raoni, pointed to a long-held belief among some international lawyers that environmental destruction should be considered a crime against humanity, the argument intensified as the global war against climate change is becoming increasingly urgent. (ICC founder charter originally incorporated the ecocide as a crime, but later deleted.)

“Ecocides at this level of intensity should be considered crimes against humanity,” Bourdon told HuffPost.

Even if the ICC does not accept that argument, the complaint asserts that Bolsonaro’s actions against Brazil’s Indigenous tribes and laws intended to protect them qualify as crimes against humanity.

During his presidential campaign, Bolsonaro advocated stripping protection of customary land, guaranteed in the state constitution, to open up the Amazon and tribal reserves to agribusiness, mining and other industrial interests. As president, he has kept that promise, removing control of customary land from FUNAI, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, and placing it under the Ministry of Agriculture.

Indigenous leaders argue that this lax protection has led to a dramatic spike in raids on tribal land and an increase in attacks on indigenous peoples. The killings of indigenous leaders rose to the highest level in more than a decade in 2019, the lawsuit filed this week asserted. In the same year, the invasion of indigenous lands increased by 135%, according to the Indigenous Brazilian Missionary Council. Meanwhile, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency issued fines for at least two decades in 2019, even as deforestation spiked.

The suit also asserts that Bolsonaro’s fires and refusal to restrict new Indigenous territories have forced people to leave their tribal lands and accuse the Brazilian president of mistreating environmental activists and NGOs, scientists and indigenous peoples.

Bolsonaro has faced constant opposition from Indigenous leaders during his presidency. In 2019, tribal activists traveled to New York to protest Bolsonaro’s policies at the General Assembly of the United Nations, which took place in the middle of a fire outbreak which engulfs the Amazon rainforest. Indigenous leaders have also struggled to block Bolsonaro’s policies and some of his appointments to the main bodies overseeing tribal affairs.

Last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit the country, tribes tried to stop appointing former Christian missionaries to head a body that deals with the isolated and unreached Amazonian tribe – an extension of the an ongoing fight to prevent missionaries from contacting isolated persons who have little or no known contact with the outside world.

Bolsonaro continued his efforts to undermine environmental protection and Indigenous people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in late April, Brazil’s Environment Minister Ricardo Salles suggested that right-wing governments should use the pandemic as a cover to “simplify regulation at scale” and “run the herd” through the Amazon.

Number of forest fires soaring again in 2020, but the Bolsonaro government’s 2021 budget proposal cut funding for environmental protection and fire prevention by 27%, the São Paulo-based Observatório do Clima, a coalition of Brazilian civil society groups, said in a report released Friday. The government budget seeks to set funding for Brazil’s environment ministry at the lowest overall level in more than two decades, the report said.

“The report shows that, in the last two years, the environmental and climate agenda in Brazil has suffered an unimaginable setback on a frightening scale,” said Marcio Astrini, executive director of Observatório do Clima, in the release accompanying the report. “Bolsonaro adopts environmental destruction as a policy … he is directly responsible for increasing fires, deforestation and national emissions.”

“The situation is dramatic,” Astrini said, “because the federal government, which is the only entity that can provide a solution to this scenario, is now the main cause of the problem.”