The right to reclaim lost bodies: recovering evidence, memory and land in law and literature

Abstract

This paper argues for the right to reclaim lost bodies, understood through three interrelated dimensions: recovering evidence of destroyed bodies, rediscovering memories of Indigenous peoples erased from history and culture and resisting legal fictions that deny original land rights. Together, these dimensions propose a renewed human rights framework capable of confronting the enduring consequences of colonialism, including shaping national identities, dispossessing legal subjects and destroying bodies. This argument is developed through literature and legal cases. It begins with the disappearance of the body of Juan de Moraes, an eleven-year-old boy killed by police in Rio de Janeiro in 2011; examines the erasure of Indigenous presence in Brazilian cultural history, including in the work of poet Gonçalves Dias and culminates in the contemporary legal struggle over the original land rights of the Xokleng nation. The paper proposes that reclaiming lost bodies is a form of justice rooted in hope, hospitality and memory. Drawing on alternative human rights methodologies inspired by Costas Douzinas, Ronnie Warrington, Edward Said, and recent scholarship on memory, alterity, and self-determination, it explores how justice might be delivered beyond legal limits, across aesthetic and ethical boundaries, in the oldest human act of returning bodies to the living.