Legal Education as an Assumption for Human Rights Effectiveness: The Experience of Capao Redondo.

The present paper has is aimed to describe legal education practices carried out with 70 high school students between 2003 and 2004 in a peripherical region of São Paulo, Brazil by law students of the University of São Paulo. The premises of that project were that ordinary people and specially population in poor areas of São Paulo were to assume an active role in the search for effectiveness of basic human rights.Traditional legal services and practices tend to ignore the potential of the average citizen to act. In fact, in most situations such traditional legal practices do not aim to include the population on a debate towards law, on the contrary, they are substantially excluded. Technical difficulties and the development of an autonomous logic and language within legal practice prevent lay citizens from being properly engaged on efforts for creating and enforcing fundamental rights.This phenomenon reaches greater implications when underclass people are concerned, since they are the ones which suffer greatly the denial of basic citizenship rights and are more frequently treated as objects rather than subjects to law. The described project in São Paulo dealt basically with land property conflicts, the need of a critical thinking towards law and collective means to overcome abuse or negligence by State. The hypothesis of the present paper, thus, is that a basic legal education focused on citizenship rights, democracy, tolerance and human rights as a whole, is the first necessary step for a more democratic legal system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]