Justice-Sector and Human Rights Reform under the Cardoso Government

Abstract

The federal government under Cardoso was not ideologically committed to the adoption of specific “neoliberal” policies in the field of crime control and criminal justice through the reform of the courts, the police, and the prison system. Its failure to curtail institutionally driven human rights violations resulted from a more diffuse “environmental” effect of neoliberalism whereby fiscal management concerns monopolized the government's economic and political capital and from structural constraints on domestic political and governance configurations such as federalism and the character of the Ministry of Justice. Penal policy in Brazil, as elsewhere, was incoherent and volatile because of the confluence of two distinct political ideologies, economic neoliberalism and social neoconservatism, with the federal government pursuing strategies of delegation and denial. Policy transfer and norm convergence were affected positively by the international human rights regime and its domestic allies and negatively by local moral conservatives and producer groups acting as policy blockers rather than entrepreneurs.