HUMAN DIGNITY AND ACESS TO JUSTICE

Abstract

Travelling through the extensive and laborious path of human dignity, in its core self, it is made evident that there is no way of thinking about a guarantee of minimum dignity without ensuring effective access to justice, both themes permeate and demand each other. Taking advantage of the extensive bibliography available on the matter, the present work aims to raise some notes of the relationship os both, in its dialogue with the contemporary challenges, recalling the course of human dignity since the first Declarations of rights in the 18th century - on its abstract dream of universalization - going through the hard experience of the 20th century and its strengthening in the post-war period. In a related way, access to justice found its first impulse in the successful Roman experience, revived at the early days of Modernity and gaining its beautiful features in the 18th century. Just like the subject of human dignity, access to justice gained momentum in the post-war period and definitely flourished at the end of the 20th century, especially in Brazil with the Constitution of 1988. Far from meaning an exhaustive consolidation of both, new challenges are presented with the need to deepen the discussions about developing mechanisms to really make them effective. Debates and proposals multiply on how to reduce the impacts of the judiciary crisis and how the implementation of new technologies can help democratize access to justice and thereby, at least in terms of ideas, ensure a  of human dignity. Even though the remedies for the contemporary problems of access to justice and protection of human dignity are being raised and putting into work, supervening challenges do not cease to dawn, propelling humanity's constant search for the ideal of justice.