DA PROTEÇÃO JURÍDICA CONFERIDA PELO ESTADO BRASILEIRO AOS DEFENSORES DE DIREITOS HUMANOS: CASOS EMBLEMÁTICOS À LUZ DA CONVENÇÃO AMERICANA SOBRE DIREITOS HUMANOS

Abstract

Brazil, as a country with a dictatorial past, is historically marked by the criminalization of activists and human rights defenders. The fallacies in the protection of defenders by the Brazilian state have become more evident in recent years, drawing attention both nationally and internationally. However, as a State party to the American Convention on Human Rights, Brazil has obligations to observe in regard to the rights of defenders. As such, this research aims to analyze the internal structure of protection, as well as the cases Nogueira de Carvalho and other (2006), Escher et al (2009) and Sales Pimenta (2022) in order to demonstrate flaws in relation to non-compliance with the commitments assumed by Brazil in the scope of the American Convention. With this purpose, it is a dogmatic study of qualitative nature, exploratory and descriptive method, using the technique of content analysis in relation to bibliographic and documentary sources regarding the theme of human rights defenders in Brazil. Thus, internal problems are brought to light in order to demonstrate the fragility of the country's protection system for human rights defenders, such as the recent systematic weakening of the Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Communicators and Environmentalists (PPDDH) and the fact that the entire structure, including the PPDDH itself, is not provided for in laws in the strict sense but in presidential decrees instead. International concern about the aggravation of the vulnerability of human rights defenders in Brazil is also demonstrated, with special attention to the analysis of the three cases in which Brazil was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as a means of accountability for supposed violations of the rights enshrined in the American Convention. As a result, it is possible to conclude that there are structural flaws in Brazil's performance in relation to the protection of human rights defenders, which were recently conjecturally deepened, and that also translate to non-compliance with the Pact of San José of Costa Rica.