Direitos humanos e acesso à justiça na América Latina e Caribe: a institucionalização e o funcionamento da Associação Interamericana das Defensorias Públicas (AIDEF)

Abstract

This research analyzed the Inter-American Association of Public Defenders (AIDEF) - a private association of Public Defenders that operates in Latin America and the Caribbean - whose objectives, among others, are to defend the full validity and effectiveness of human rights and establish a permanent system of interinstitutional coordination and cooperation of Public Defender's Offices and public defender associations in the Americas and the Caribbean. This research was qualitative and was divided into two parts. The first part analyzed the concepts and historical evolution of human rights, citizenship and access to justice, highlighting the role of AIDEF. The second part of the research analyzed the institutionalization and functioning of the Inter-American Association of Public Defenders (AIDEF), in light of historical institutionalism as a theoretical foundation, and its relationship with the Inter-American Human Rights System. Documentary ethnography was carried out in relation to documents produced by a legal bureaucracy within the scope of the Inter-American Association of Public Defenders (AIDEF), making it possible to analyze the gaps and silences in the minutes produced, including their loquaciousness, in addition to the grammar used by their actors. main. Bobbio's concepts of individual rights and social rights were also analyzed, at the same time that Flores' approach to human rights was analyzed. Furthermore, the conceptualization of citizenship was based on Marshall's approach. The model of access to justice in the rest of Latin America and the one developed in Brazil have similarities, since the Public Defender's Office model was adopted, which has progressively occupied the normative-constitutional space for the social implementation of human rights. The AIDEF formation process began in 2003 and was completed in 2009, when AIDEF acquired legal personality, being characterized as a process of slow institutionalization. Then, a new phase of the association began, which ended in 2013, embodied in closer relations with the Organization of American States (OAS), which resulted in the signing of two agreements so that public defenders inter-Americans began to work with the Court and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the issuance of three resolutions that encouraged the institutionalization of Public Defenders' Offices within the national states that are members of the OAS. In the period analyzed by the research, that is, from 2003 to 2013, two public defenders had intense participation in the institutionalization and functioning of AIDEF, contributing to the acquisition of the association's legal personality and to the creation of agreements and the editing of resolutions by the OAS.