In the last decades environmental concerns have been arising as a result of the climate changes and the ongoing deforestation in tropical regions. To conciliate the exploration and conservation of the forests some mechanisms have , among them the forest certification. In Brazil, it has been presented more than a decade, through the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), an NGO (Non-governmental organization) which established standard guidelines for forest management certification. Such guidelines have nine principles and the first one deal with "Compliance with laws and FSC Principles", demanding the compliance and respect of all applicable laws of the country where it operates and comply with all their Principles and Criteria. In this context, this study aimed to verify the influence of forest certification in the legislation compliance in the units of management of native forest. Data was collected from public reports of the certificated management units until 2007. The evaluation was made up through the identification and analyses of the main non-conformance, related to the first principle. It was found that the main problems were related to the environmental and labor legislation. The labor legislation non-conformances were mostly related to the problems with the outsourced workers and environmental legislation relating to permanent preservation areas and lack of permit from environmental agencies.
FSC; environmental legislation; labor legislation
