Author:

Joana de Menezes Araújo da Cruz

Abstract:

This dissertation demonstrates that the right to civil disobedience, a modality of law to the popular resistance, consists in a fundamental right extracted implicitly from the Constitution of 1988. Nevertheless, society and State have a complex relationship with the protesting disobedience. However, it is not a peculiarity of Brazil. Several Democratic States and Rules of Laws around the world, including those that also recognize civil disobedience as a legal category in itself, do not confer on it a legal treatment that befit the democratic values and the bases of constitutionalism. This study demonstrates that the insufficiency of definition traditionally conferred on disobedience is a relevant factor that leads to the criminalization of the social activism. The rigidity and the conceptual severity of the mentioned right allow that typical actions of demonstrations, which involve the breaking of commands edited by authorities, become the target of serious legal and antidemocratic reactions by the State, due to the non-conformity with the classical characteristics demanded in order to be considered civil and legitimate. Thus, the traditional definition of civil disobedience does not deserve to be substituted; in fact it must be broadened and updated because it has become insufficient to deal with the injustice, and the political and economic conditions that generate it in the contemporary political, social and economic context. This scenario, marked by the globalization phenomenon, in which political activists are treated as terrorists and criminals for adopting tactics that they consider to be more efficient on the fight against the oppression of the economic power and prejudice, makes it clear the conceptual relevance of civil disobedience. In addition to the all the normative burden, it also defines, in an elastic manner, the limits of the exercise of civil disobedience within the rule of law.