Preface
| Autor | Michael Mohallem |
| Páginas | 10-12 |
Page 10
In the history of Human Rights, Latin America has been oscillating between defeat and inspiring leadership.
Following World War II, the region led the creation of the world’s irst extensive international Human Rights instrument - the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, in April 1948 - marking the beginning of the Rights Era, months before what would become its greater symbol, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
According to Paolo Carozza, ‘the region exhibited a dedication to international Human Rights generally at a time when the idea was still viewed with reluctance or even hostility by most other states’.1But such commitment to rights was soon replaced by a succession of national dictatorial regimes, state violence and backlashes against freedom and democracy.
The long absence of democracy in Latin America was inally replaced by liberal regimes. The nineties witnessed governments as concerned with free elections as they were with lexible working rights, economic globalisation and the free market.
Finally, a period of intense transformations arose from the ascension to power of governments with repressed plans of more political participation, income, gender, racial and social equality, less inluence of corporations in elections and freedom of expression.
The new wave of hopes blended with the promises of digital rights. Internet and technology invited politics into its core and since then have been delivering a renewed agenda of rights and regulatory debates.
But what makes the case of Latin America so special in relation to rights protection?
In addition to the historical relevance of Human Rights, it is possible to identify ive main contemporary reasons for the adoption of strong legal protective schemes. First, the region has been subject to a common ideological inluence of Human Rights principles through the Catholic
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doctrine and more recently through socialist thinking.2Though a global phenomenon, ‘the impulse to incorporate dignity [into states constitutions] was clearly strongest in those circles which were inluenced by Catholic or socialist thinking, and probably most strongly in those circles where both inluences were present’.3Secondly, the period of dictatorship regimes throughout the region encouraged the adoption of a higher level of protection of Human Rights. Although not all states in the region suffered a coup d’état, even in those where the constitutional tradition was...
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