Participação ou formalismo? O impacto das audiências públicas no Supremo Tribunal Federal brasileiro

• Ano de defesa: 2010
• Autor(a) principal: Vestena, Carolina Alves
• Orientador(a): Gonçalves, Guilherme Leite
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Palavras-chave em Português: Supremo Tribunal Federal
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/7832

The present work intends to demonstrate the structural impossibility of democratization for the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) coming from the social participation in the jurisdictional public hearings. In order to do so, this study is divided in three parts. In the first one, two macro social phenomena are approached – the Welfare state crisis and the economic globalization – with the purpose of rescuing the main interpretations about the emergence of the Judiciary and identifying the originated normative projects of reform. It is possible to highlight Burgos and Vianna’s perspective (2002), given the fact that its content can be verified in official speeches interpreting the public hearings as democratization tools for the STF. The second chapter questions the possibility of a participative democratization in the STF from Poulantzas’ political theory (2000) approach. Under this conceptual matrix’s scope, law, in the capitalist social formation, organizes interests and unifies consent in order to shape the social body according to the priorities of the class sitting on the top of the dominant power’s block. It foresees the concession and withdrawal of rights according to the political movements of the classes, which are in a continuous state of dispute within a State formed by material characteristics and permeated by fissures. In this sense, public hearings are interpreted as procedures which sophisticate the court’s traditional formalism, hiding the exercise of control through mechanisms which would apparently make room for popular participation and make intervention opportunities for agents from different social groups equal. These characteristics suggest the impossibility of democratizing its structures. Finally, in the third chapter, the case study of the five hearings that took place points out the to the reproduction of the litigious disposition as part of the juridical process in these events, given the fact that the Ministers played a minimal role in these procedures, displaying participants in opposite sides as if they were exerting their right to the contradictory while only using the pronouncements from the hearings in their votes to reinforce arguments which are favorable to their already-established points of view. According to the tabulated information, the present work suggests that the public hearings do not provoke democratizing impacts in the STF’s structures. What they do is sophisticate existing procedures in order to reproduce the traditional role of controlling the judicial apparatus within capitalism.