Journal de recherche médico-légale

Social rights and the (lack of) control of power: The Brazilian case

Abstract

Airto Chaves

One of the good indicators of social control of power is the way in which contemporary societies deal with transitional justice. The most academic approaches to transitional justice, especially in Brazil, usually does not observe the role played by The Supreme Court in particular, and the judiciary in general. This paper seeks to make a relatively different approach. We observe the regulatory frameworks of the Brazilian authoritarian periods, such as the preamble of the 1937 Brazilian Constitution and the preamble of the Institutional Act n. 1/64, looking at them as they were like the Comic Code Authority, in a comparative approach, and observing, also in a comparative way, the Supreme Court as representative of a kind of “Ring of Gyges”, the mythical famous magical artifact mentioned by Plato in his Republic, in order to allow the “invisibility” of supposed heroes at authoritarian regimes, in a struggle that sought to identify “good guys” and “bad guys”, or the “good” versus “evil” in a context in which normative transitional disputes resemble reports of different narratives, and within which the version matters more than the responsibility for the violation of rights and the human dignity. This paper uses the essay style, through bibliographic review as a method to talk about the theme described in this abstract.