Brazil's Supreme Court gave Congress two years to decide the rules for mining on Indigenous land

The full bench of Brazil's Supreme Court confirmed Justice Flávio Dino's ruling in the Cinta Larga case: until 2028 there is no specific law, but provisional rules already apply, capping exploitable territory at 1%.

The full bench of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) confirmed, on August 13, 2026, the preliminary injunction granted in February by Justice Flávio Dino in Writ of Injunction 7516: the National Congress has 24 months, until 2028, to pass a law regulating mining on Indigenous land — something Article 231, paragraph 3 of the 1988 Constitution requires but that has never been legislated. The case reached the STF at the request of an association of the Cinta Larga people, in Rondônia, who are seeking the right to mine their own land.

The ruling doesn't open up mining on Indigenous land — it creates a provisional regulatory window while the legal vacuum remains unfilled. In the meantime, the STF set specific rules: only 1% of the demarcated area can be subject to exploitation; prior consultation with affected communities is required, under ILO Convention 169; part of the revenue must be shared for collective benefit purposes; and any project depends on government and congressional approval, an environmental impact study, and degraded-area recovery measures. The detail most relevant to anyone following the sector: the ruling isn't about third parties exploiting Indigenous land — it stems from a request by the Cinta Larga Indigenous people themselves to mine their own territory, which changes the political reading of the precedent. The backdrop that explains the court's caution is the Yanomami migration crisis, in which roughly 20,000 illegal miners invaded the territory, causing malaria outbreaks, malnutrition, and deaths — an episode that shaped the limits the STF set in the provisional rules.

For companies, investors, and Indigenous communities themselves interested in critical minerals on Indigenous land, the ruling doesn't release anything immediately — but it sets the path and the deadline within which Congress must act, and it already makes clear under what conditions any legal mining will operate once the law exists. For anyone doing regulatory due diligence on projects in Brazil, this is a piece of the legal puzzle that simply didn't exist before — a vacuum that now has a deadline to end.