"HUMAN RIGHTS AND REDEMOCRATIZATION: THE COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE RIGHTS OF THE HUMAN PERSON (1984-91890)".
constitutional history; Council for the Defense of Human Rights; cddph; human rights; redemocratization.
This research investigates the role and the performance of the National Council for the Defense of the Rights of the Human Person (CDDPH) during the redemocratization following the military dictatorship (1984-1989), focusing on the use and political construction of the concept of human rights within the Council and its influence on the state bureaucracy of the period. The CDDPH, now renamed 1 and reformulated as the National Council of Human Rights (CNDH), is a state agency created in 1968, during the military dictatorship, reflecting its paradoxal behaviour. After redemocratization, civil society and Council members made the CDDPH a milestone in the repositioning of the brazilian Federal Government on the matter of human rights and a space to think about the country’s redemocratization under this prism. Therefore, the Council was the scene of divergent (or convergent, however, different) views on the concept of human rights. Different public institutions and social movements within the Council tried to place their respective agenda as a priority and the product of this meeting of agendas moved, to a certain extent, the state bureaucracy of human rights in Brazil in the second half of the 1980s. This is a constitutional history research that focuses on a state institution. The main source is the collection of tape recordings of plenary meetings of the CDDPH, with a time frame from 1984-1989, available at the archive of the Ministry of Human Rights, in Brasília. Other official documents available at the National Archives, on websites of state agencies, in archives of civil society entities and journalistic news were also used as sources. The research is divided into three chapters, the first introduces the reader to the CDDPH from an analysis of the founding process of the Council, since the its proposal, in 1956, and begins the study of primary sources with a comparison between the last meeting carried out during the dictatorship, in 1984, and the first after redemocratization, in 1985. The other two chapters are divided thematically. The second focuses on the Council's attention to the past, especially the violations of human rights committed by the military dictatorship, while the third focuses on the Council's vision of the future of Brazilian redemocratization.