Main subject:
Democratic State of Law x Police State: Dilemmas and challenges within two decades of Constitution

This subject expresses a dichotomy present in all the main democracies of the Western Hemisphere, thus threatening them. Since the 9/11 attack to the World Trade Center, democratic freedom is gradually decreasing in the countries that have most cultivated it throughout history – starting with the United States.

Since then, all kinds of racism and prejudice exhibitions have occurred, harming above all Third World immigrants. A symbolic example is the case of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by English policemen, who were not held criminally responsible by the country’s justice system.

Brazil does not live in the terrorism paranoia. But using the fight against corruption and organized crime as an excuse, the country has been a scenario of recurrent violations to fundamental principles of the democratic State of Law.

Advocacy has witnessed the disregard of its prerogatives by public agents. The more frequent use of telephone tapping, which violates the privacy between client and lawyer, is harmful to fundamental citizen rights. The Judiciary has been connivent to such a practice by authorizing it.

The fair popular outcry for the end of impunity, which embraces the ordinary criminal to those who practice corruption, works as an incentive to the suppression of rights and to the appropriate legal procedure, on the part of rulers and public agents. And that threatens democracy.

Not only advocacy pays the price. Fundamental freedoms, such as press freedom and freedom of speech are also violated. There is the fraudulent appeal to malicious abuse of legal process, in which institutions try to embarrass the press through a simultaneous creation of identical procedures in dozens of cities, in such a way that it imposes economic sanctions, which inhibit the right to criticism.

There is no discussion as current and as wide-ranging in the year we celebrate 20 years of existence of the 1988 Federal Constitution. The Brazilian Bar, representing the civil society, will do great service to the democratic cause, by discussing this issue at the XX National Conference of Lawyers.