Fundamental Rights and Lines for Reformulating the Brazilian Criminal Procedure Code

Abstract

Brazil, a geopolitically complex country, has a criminal process that is problematic in several respects: in the legal sphere, there are difficulties of constitutional compatibility in terms of isonomy; sociologically, from the statistics, one can see the discriminatory selectivity with which criminal justice operates; psychologically, the legal regime of evidence weakens the adversarial method in the formation of evidence and tends to push judges into paranoid spirals in the conduct of proceedings, overriding the centrality of the parties in the cognitive activity of the process. With the aim of clarifying the premises needed to discuss an accusatory reform in the country, the article describes the state of the art of Brazilian criminal procedure, evaluates the proposal of the preliminary draft of a new code of criminal procedure (PLS 156/09) and, drawing on foreign experience (especially Italian and Chilean), to the extent that it is useful for the argument, proposes an accusatory model that is considered to be more appropriate to the Brazilian legal and social reality.