For us, the right to land is also a matter of social justice and is closely linked to the right to autonomy, healthy food, decent housing and common goods, under other logics than those of the market or heterosexual family. Around the world, women have less access to land than men. As I explained in another article, they have deserted us and they know it. However, this right, as such, has long been absent from human rights discussions.

Thus, of the nine international covenants on fundamental human rights, the right to land is mentioned only once, and in the context of the territorial rights of rural women. The aim is to ensure that there is no gender discrimination in agricultural reform policies in the few places where they have existed. It is undoubtedly a great step forward to avoid heteropatriarchal dynamics within the family, but it is far from enough to face the reality that most of the planet’s land is under the control of transnational agribusiness.

Faced with this reality, just 10 years ago, the proposal to recognize the human right to land has gained some strength in the international legal debate as an alternative to not accessing the classic right to property. Indeed, the right to property is enshrined not only in article 17 of the Universal Declaration, but also in the International Conventions on All Forms of Racial Discrimination and on Discrimination against Women.

This proposal not only deepens the memory, truth and justice of all the peasants killed for defending land and territory, but also seeks, for those of us who feed the critical praxis of Law, to question and evolve International Human Rights Law itself. In other words, from an anthropocentric and instrumentalist perspective of the land, which considers the land as an entry point for the exercise of other rights, it implies a transition to the recognition that the land sustains life and sows the identity and culture of the peoples, and therefore has a human right that is fundamental as such.
In this sense, we must always be clear: Law does not change reality, but reality changes the Law. And what the current reality in the Basque Country shows us is that instead of moving forward in the policy of acquiring stolen land consistent with the ecofeminist transition that we need as a nation, the EU and Basque organizations and companies are betting on recovering the capitalist economy through militarization and the war industry. The intensification of the (necro)border policy and the inability of International Humanitarian Law to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people are some of the most dramatic evidence of this dangerous dissociation between being and the legal obligation to be.

In the end, any proposal to recognize human rights is embedded in an international legal structure that responds to a geopolitical organization of power. These regulations are governed by a false universality that discursively eliminates the historical, cultural and social inequalities between men, women, peoples, nations, states and territories, naturalised by the inequality and, at the same time, justified by oppression. Human rights, like land and women’s bodies, are also at issue.

Therefore, the recognition of the human right to land, instead of being a falsely ahistorical, neutral and timeless discourse, must serve to recognize and repair it. On the one hand, the original heteropatriarchal spur of recognition, which, together with the colonial supremacist project of population whitening, incorporates and perfects capitalist accumulations to the present day. On the other hand, to observe all the precariousness, horror and violence imposed on women by the working capital and its male elites.

In short, the recognition of the human right to land is important to represent other forms of organization – including legally – of the care of life, but as long as it assumes the responsibility of institutions, financial institutions and internal oligarchies. In the absence of a transformative and harassing materiality towards that which prevents the realization of the contents of many existing rights, the human right to land will hardly lead to good living for women in rural areas. On the 17th of April, the best tribute we can pay to those who have taken us is to continue fighting.