O INDIVÍDUO COMO SUJEITO DE DIREITO INTERNACIONAL NO SISTEMA INTERAMERICANO DE PROTEÇÃO DOS DIREITOS HUMANOS

Abstract

This dissertation is aimed on analyzing the role of a general individual inside the inter- American system for protection of the human rights, in order to understand how this individual is subject to rights and duties before the International Rights. More specifically, this work wants to verify an individual's legal capacity to sue inside this regional system, based on the American Convention for Human Rights. Bibliographical-deductive and comparative methods were used, which means this research had an exploratory-qualitative approach. It started by a dogmatic-juridical study and after that the historical study was made, using also the ideas from the logical-semantic constructivism. The historical approach of the human rights was aimed on adding conceptual and fundamental questions, in order to understand the process of internationalization and protection of these rights. In the area of the inter-American regional system, the structure and the functionality of the Inter-American Commission were analyzed, based on four selected real cases, and starting from a completeness point of view of the process, in other words, cases that would allow an analysis of the works of the Commission and the Court. The cases Ximenes Lopes, Nogueira de Carvalho, Sétimo Garibaldi and Escher, all of them against Brazil, allowed observing how the individual accesses the Commission and the step-by-step of a case inside this organism of the American Convention. Following, the structure and the functionality of the American Court were studied, also in regard to the four cases listed above, aimed on analyzing whether the individual has corporate entity, and therefore having the legal capacity to sue under these twoinstitutions: Commission and court. From the individual's lack of being recognized by the Court, the main organism of the inter-American system, a potential failure was detected, regarding the major purpose of this system, which is to promote the enforcement of the human rights inside the inter-American regional context, since these rights will only be fully respected and enforced by actions that truly allow the effective access of the individual to the entities of verification and judgment, turning the individual into a real subject of the international rights.