Popular participation and ‘unprecedented viability’ in justice: the extensive and ad-referenced experience of Citizen Ombudsman´s Public Defender of Bahia
Public Defender. Ombudsman. Popular Participation. Paulo Freire.
Since 1988, with the promulgation of our Citizen Constitution, civil society has raised hopes and an active force for the strengthening of democratic state structures, with proposals aimed at social emancipation. In this paper, I present the case study of a concrete and collective initiative aimed at contributing to the reorientation of law and justice, making them more present and affirmative in the lives of the oppressed people. The institution embraced is the Public Defender of the State of Bahia, through its external ombudsman, considered as potentially critical and creative, to reverse inequalities and guarantee access to justice. The Ombudsman's external ombudsmen were considered, throughout the thesis, as a viable novelty in the field of popular participation in justice, coming from a civil society proposal that became mandatory after the approval of Federal Complementary Law No. 132, dated October 7, 2009. I unveil the experience from 2009, the year of the creation of the Citizens Ombudsman's Office of the Bahia Defender, until 2017, with the closing of the field actions. The research gained broad outlines with the mapping of external ombudsmen, based on the survey of the legislative base of the twenty-seven Brazilian Ombudsman Offices. Having as a theoretical and methodological contribution the pedagogies of Paulo Freire and the critical theory of law, I carried out data collection in multiple sources: sites of the 27 state Defender's offices; Organic Laws of all state Ombudsman Offices and any internal rules on the choice of the ombudsman or the ombudsman's office; documentary collection of the five processes of choice of ombudsman made available by the Bahian Ombudsman; shorthand notes from the Legislative Assembly of Bahia; and the personal collection of the researcher-incarnate, in view of my status as former ombudsman and former president of the National Ombudsman's Office of Public Defenders. As findings of the research, we verified that, although foreseen in the Organic Laws of twenty-two state Ombudsman Offices, the external ombudsmen were only 13 of them; even though no priority was given to popular participation through collegial structures to support the ombudsman or even administrative support compatible with the task. In the study of the Citizen Ombudsman's Office, we verified how the defenders and the Ombudsman's management were established over the years, with the aim of modulating popular participation in their interests, highlighting the normative adequacy strategies; reducing the scope of civil society in the choice of the ombudsman; and the emptying of the operative group as a mechanism for decentralizing popular participation.