Fundamentos sócio-históricos dos direitos humanos e a “mão visível” do estado: a relação ambígua na garantia e violação na atualidade brasileira

Abstract

This study, conducted through a quali-quantitative investigation grounded in the historical-dialectical materialist method, utilized bibliographic sources and official data related to human rights violations, sourced from the latest publications of the Brazilian Public Security Forum - 17th and 18th Brazilian Yearbooks on Public Security; the National Mechanism for the Prevention and Combating of Torture (MNPCT) - 2023 Annual Report; and the latest publication from the Prison Pastoral - Report "Voices and Times of Torture in the Era of Mass Incarceration." The objective was to address the contradictory relationship between human rights and the State, which presents a dynamic between the formal guarantee and the violation of human rights by the state apparatus. The study analyzes the perceptions, ambivalences, and conceptualizations surrounding the consolidation of bourgeois social order and its contemporary implications. The State, in turn, constitutes the institutional apparatus that, as a class regulator, intervenes in society in a contradictory manner, simultaneously guaranteeing and violating rights, following a logic that predominantly serves the interests of the dominant class and legitimizes the power of capitalism. This relationship of human rights violations is a complex and multifaceted combination that involves a conjunction of historical, social, cultural, economic, and political elements. In order to illustrate the ambiguous nature of the State, we present data that exposes the violation of human rights by its agents, which in this study are related to police lethality in the public security system and prison lethality in the carceral system. Data on human rights violations in the prison system is scarce, offering only a sample of those reported to the Prison Pastoral. The MNPCT also does not provide inspection data on prison units across the country in its reports. It is evident that both the MNPCT and the Prison Pastoral face significant difficulties in ensuring the implementation of their work, resulting in crimes and the cruel, inhumane reality remaining hidden, which contributes to the persistence of torture and other forms of human rights violations as part of sentence enforcement. Thus, the State has operationalized mechanisms that resemble Penal Codes designed to penalize “vagrancy,” to the detriment of its numerous formal legal commitments in Human Rights Courts, conventions, and the like.