“WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS”: ACCESS TO JUSTICE AT THE JACO COMMUNITY’S HOUSING CONFLICT(NATAL/RN)
Access to Justice, Eviction, Housing Rights, Jacó community
Access to justice is understood as the most basic human right in a justice system, as it refers to the right to achieve rights. Regarding access to justice related to housing rights, attention is drawn to the way it is materialized in the face of collective eviction conflicts, characterized as collective expropriation processes, in which low-income people or families are displaced of their dwelling places or their habitat. Considering that these conflicts can also involve the violation of several human rights, such as the access to the usual means of subsistence and to basic services of communication, electricity, drinking water, basic sanitation and garbage collection, it appears that these subjects may find themselves in a condition of wide vulnerability and fragility substantially confirmed in the inequality in access to justice. Thus, the affirmation of this inequality can occur in the use of the legal form as a means of intimidation and even in the delegitimization of the relationship of those threatened with the usufruct of the housing right in a given space. This theme became important in the work process developed with the Jacó community in Natal/RN, whose insertion first took place in 2016 through the Motyrum de Educação Popular em Direitos Humanos extension project at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, acting mainly in the field of legal and urban assistance. The community, defined as a Special Area of Social Interest within the scope of the Natal Master Plan and located in the neighborhood of Rocas, is facing an eviction conflict provoked by the municipality since 2018. In this dispute, inequality in the access to justice can be symbolically signaled in a speech-complaint by a resident about their dehumanization by municipal agents in which it was necessary to remind them that “we are people, we are not animals, no”. In this context, the question is: how does access to justice materialize in the eviction conflict experienced by residents of the Jacó community from 2018 onwards? By hypothesis, it is assumed that access to justice in the eviction conflict experienced by residents of the Jacó community from 2018 onwards is achieved through the actions of residents as collective subjects of rights. The object of study is defined by access to justice, in a broad conception, related to the action of residents as collective subjects of law present in the experience of threat of eviction of residents of the Jacó community, since 2018. The goal is to understand access to justice, considering the threat of eviction experienced by the Jacó community as of 2018. The approach of the broad conception of access to justice is adopted, a way of understanding empirical experiences of justice through social struggle and the category of collective subjects right. Procedurally, it is a work that starts from the production of extension for research. Meetings and hearings in municipal secretariats, City Council of Councilors, Public Defender and Public Prosecution offices were attended, in addition to meetings and workshops held along with the community. As a result, an empirical experience of the Comunidade do Jacó is presented in its processes of struggle for the right to decent housing.
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