"A special book: The right to have rights"
is the title of a human rights manual for social organizations thought that just had its second edition, foreword by Robert Gargarella. Is the product of a long-standing experience in involving lawyers, journalists, social scientists and artists.
By Daniel Bader
The right to have rights was born of a sum of urgent militant practices, continued as a university extension proposal and is now a product-plus- Editorial: A human rights handbook atypical class action oriented with respect to rights enshrined in law but most of the time remain a dead letter.
Several of the authors of this manual, which has just submitted its second edition in less than a year, participated in collective books The criminalization of social protest (Group CHILDREN and Crack Group Publishing, 2003) and Policy terror. Forms of state terrorism in globalization (Ad-Hoc, 2007, reviewed in Bridges 21). More than once did or emergency calls received by an eviction or detention of a fellow, more than once found themselves answering the same questions.
In the book's foreword, the constitutional Roberto Gargarella characterized the Argentine political system as a democracy wound. There holds: Mechanisms of public action that have been in our extra-institutional power are illegal or directly by first places of the society outside the law, then is accused acting outside the law. Gargarella
's work, a professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, is one of the influences of the work carried out in La Plata. His books The right to protest: the first right and the right to resist the law, it became a benchmark to justify the social protest from a constitutional perspective. The manual, which was first a run sponsored by the Universidad Nacional de La Plata-free distribution among social organizations, and is entering the libraries on the imprint of The Collective, was proposed to bring these ideas to the neighborhoods to turn them into tools of social mobilization. Enlarge
democracy
The problem is not the vote, but the absolute absence of mechanisms that help to vote, complement, allowing the dialogue, the movement of voices able to help and correct each other, writes Gargarella. As explained by the authors of the right to have rights, many citizens who hold positions in the state (officials, judges and prosecutors) or develop his career in the private mass media, challenging the social protest because they ignore or refuse to recognize their constitutional status. For these citizens, who are nearly always part of the social sector (upper and middle sectors), we should not focus on the protest from the Constitution but from the Penal Code criminalizes (...) This view sees the marginalized as a danger to democracy, not realizing (or not wanting to do) that not only legally pursue shutting down democracy for important social sectors, but banning policy, ie, preventing these areas to exercise self-government.
A Truly democratic state, he argued, should protect rather than quell the protest, guarding the expression of disadvantaged groups of society. Not only because of social protest, while freedom of expression and assembly, is the essence of democracy, one of the forms assumed by civic engagement, but because those protagonists of the protest groups do not have the same opportunities as other sectors express problems that hinder the free development of their life plan.
rights are taken when exercised, the maximum of Cuban poet and independence hero José Martà coordinated through the publication by Esteban Rodriguez, Mariana and Gabriel Relli Appella, that aims to review all that the State promised in international treaties, and thus build control strategies for work, education, health and housing. A full chapter is devoted to support of the sinews of democracy. In line with Gargarella, claim that the right to protest is the first law in a democratic state because it is the law that allows citizens (without the necessary through their representatives) to publicly demand the recovery of other rights.
The opening chapter, Promise and present human rights, confronts all that the State undertook to ensure, as a counterpart of everyday image: the increasing abandonment basic services, the neglect of social welfarism and violence of police abuse.
The following chapters are devoted to specific topics, including the rights stand against police violence. The choice issue, which is far from exhausting the promises of the state is explained by the genesis of the manual: a previous study done for years with social organizations in the region.
A collective exercise
Draft The right to have rights began-and continues-to workshops with neighborhood activists around themes defined by their needs, then addressed in the chapters: rights abuses against security forces, the scope of the so-called right to the city, and community outreach strategies to overcome the media blockade and replicate the experience in the neighborhoods where working groups recipients of social experience. Before this work there is a long experience of counseling and legal defense of activists, coupled with academic reflection on the criminalization of poverty and social protest from a seminar at the Faculty of Juridical and Social Sciences National University of La Plata.
The manual is supplied mainly from workshops with organizations territorial over the years, executed in three extension projects accredited by the UNLP in 2005, 2006 and 2007, with the participation of several faculties. Funding for the initiative, with input also from the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, allowed the first edition. The publication also carries the seal of the Collective for Research and Legal Action (CIAJ) and politico-cultural Warehouse Sur, participants in the project. Recently, the experience was accredited as a university extension program at UNLP, ensuring continuity for three years. This year's team focused on circulating the handbook presents in different provinces and in some Latin American countries (Uruguay, Mexico and Colombia) and conduct workshops for organizations to use give rather than remaining stationary in a library. In 2010 plan to continue working with a hot topic: the rights of children and adolescents. The most significant
manual is thinking of a collective interlocutor rather than a free citizen: The only way to guarantee their exercise, especially within the marginalized, disadvantaged and vulnerable, is the organization (.. .) There are no rights without organization.
We are not classic guide to the recommendations lists the police can stop you without reason. On the contrary, says the police stop you, and does so by being too dark and poor. Having taken the reality, proposing alternative answers to what to do when we stop when we steal the documents, when we cached and checked us when we are at the police station when we stop more time than any, when we uncommunicate when torture us when we paper (ie a case against armed or forged) or in cases of trigger-happy, among other responses required.
A key chapter is that dealing with violence by security forces, which tends to be the state's best-known face among the popular sectors. The manual emphasizes the illegality and teaches ways to defend themselves. There is clear that the proposal is aimed at social organizations, not individual subjects.
The proposed rights The right to have encouraged citizens to band together to defend and encourages social protest. Therefore, the boards relate to how to deal with the criminalization of public intimidation, for sedition, by coercion or extortion, disobeying authority, damages, ie, the most common forms of criminalization of social protest. On the other hand, details the methods of growing police abuse in everyday life. The police are not solving objective insecurity (crime) but, above all, the subjective uncertainty (fear of crime). Police will not prosecute illegal actions but youth groups stigmatized by society as lazy or suspects, say the authors.
focused on a dresser apparently banal routines, point out that policing look through a particular situation on a case by case, no crime. But if we tie each of these acts, if we begin to relate, if we start to cross the data, then it may shed light on these practices, and cropping characterize them as potential crimes. In this regard, the suggestion is that social organizations to develop a record where write peers or neighbors who were detained or delayed, the date, time and name or veneer or the cops or the number of patrol if you know. (...) With this record not only seek to determine those involved in institutional practices, but above all, finding that these practices always or almost always fall on the same individuals or groups of people. All with a view, tomorrow, to make a complaint or legal filing (for example, present a habeas corpus preventivo) against the practices and routines by police were abusive, discriminatory and violent.
This manual human rights for no social organizations intended to be comprehensive, clear from the start: they will not find here a section referring to the rights that women or children, or the aborigines, or immigrants, or peasants, nor possible to develop strategies for putting highlight the problems that may have these groups. What it is raised is the way, an exemplary experience of joint work between the university, human rights organizations and social actors from the grassroots, that he recognized some outstanding work of human rights organizations in Argentina, doomed until then mainly the fight against the perpetrators and ideological state terrorism of the last civil-military dictatorship and against impunity.
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