Right to protest, violent protests and right to resist

Abstract

This paper explores important and complex questions in the field of Political and Constitutional Philosophy starting from a brief review of the manifestations that occurred in Brazil in relatively recent historical periods. Thus, among other aspects, the study intends to briefly examine the fundamental right to protest as a component of democratic regimes and their scope, especially with regard to the practice of acts of violence and the ravage of public and private property committed by some of protesters such as occurred especially in 2013. It intends to investigate in particular whether acts of violence committed during protests could possibly be supported by the so-called right to resist, a subject that is obscured and partly neglected in current Constitutional Theory. The article rescues some of the substantial and procedural requirements and limits pointed by the literature for the exercise of the controversial right, and seeks to apply them to the acts of violence that occurred in those manifestations. The article concludes by the impossibility of recognizing the cessation of the duty to obey the law in that concrete situation, without rejecting the possibility of its characterization under other more serious circumstances.