The National Council for Human Rights
The National Council for Human Rights is the organ responsible for formulating, coordinating and supervising the national policy on human rights, as well as ensuring that public authorities, services of public relevance and individuals respect those rights. The former council for human rights was transformed into the National Council for Human Rights in June, 2014, by Act 12,986. The act, an old demand of the civil society, aims to guarantee the participation and an open and cross-sectoral debate among the various social actors that defend human rights. The council?s responsibilities include: the promotion of measures necessary for the prevention, suppression, penalization and compensation of conducts and situations that are contrary to human rights - including those provided for in treaties and international acts ratified in the country - and establishing the respective responsibilities; the monitoring of the national policy on human rights, as well as suggesting and recommending guidelines for its implementation; receiving representations or complaints on conducts or situations that are contrary to human rights and establishing the responsible persons or organs; giving recommendations to public and private entities involved with the protection of human rights while setting reasonable deadlines to propose solutions or to justify the impossibility of doing so; giving special attention to areas of higher occurrence of human rights violations, in which representative offices of the council can be installed for as long as necessary; commenting, through resolutions agreed on by the absolute majority of its members, on crimes that should be considered human rights violations of exceptional gravity due to their characteristics and effects in order to monitor measures necessary to their verification, process and trial. The council was comprised of 22 members until 2016, 11 of which are representatives of government agencies and 11, of civil society organizations.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- embedded in the constitution/legislation
- Frequency
- regular
- Mode of selection of participants
- restricted
- Type of participants
- civil society
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a non-binding decision
- Co-Governance
- yes
Means
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Ends
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