Who we are / Areas of work


Areas of work


  • Land, Territory and Spatial Justice

    Terra de Direitos works to ensure recognition and enforcement of the human right to land and to urban and rural territories, supporting the collective struggle of social movements.

    It works to strengthen social networks, institutional and monitoring spaces relating to public policies to ensure spatial justice and the democratization of urban and rural land.

    It believes that ensuring these rights necessarily involves guaranteeing the right to the city and to land and that for the most part this will happen through the materialization of agrarian reform and urban reform.

    Its actions comprise the fight for the Right to the City, the guarantee and defence of Quilombola community territories, working on urban and rural Land Conflicts, as well as the Impacts of Infrastructure Megaprojects on the right to land and territories.

  • Human Rights Policy and Culture

    Terra de Direitos is committed to building a new culture of human rights that overcomes fear, combats authoritarianism and dehumanization and is based on plurality, diversity, participative democracy and integration between peoples.

    As such it works to recognize and strengthen the actions of Human Rights Defenders in social transformation and ensuring rights.

    It understands that it is important to debate the relationship between Business and Human Rights in cases of conflict between economic interests and the safeguard of rights and guarantees or, moreover, when private agents are responsible for human rights violations.

    It seeks to build collective civil society spaces to monitor and demand human rights and the building of public policies that incorporate the principles of universality, interdependence and indivisibility.

  • Democratization of Justice

    Terra de Direitos undertakes actions relating to public interest law, advocacy and research, seeking to ensure that Human Rights regulatory frameworks are guaranteed, recognized and materialized within the Justice System.

    Through interlocution with jurists and social movements, it seeks the creation of a culture of human rights with greater grassroots participation to monitor the conception and management of the policy on justice. It aims to provoke a profound restructuring and greater democratization of the Justice System, with special focus on the Judiciary Branch.

  • Biodiversity and Food Sovereignty

    Terra de Direitos seeks to ensure that the rights of farmers, traditional peoples and communities to the free use of agrobiodiversity are guaranteed. It also works to strengthen experiences and efforts to achieve food sovereignty.

    To this end, it works to defend the right to produce and have access to food produced in a sustainable and agro-ecological manner. It is opposed to the hegemonic productive model headed by large and multinational businesses, which generates social inequality through the concentration of land ownership, the expansion of monoculture, the imposition of technological packages, the use of intellectual property mechanisms over common goods and the commercialization of nature.

    It defends production that respects producers and their surrounding environment, in view of the fact that the use of pesticides, transgenic varieties and seed patenting are harmful and only benefit large businesses.