"A gente é gente!": acesso à justiça no conflito por moradia na comunidade do Jacó (Natal/RN)

Abstract

The present work has as its theme acess to justice in the context of forced evictions, which concerns processes of expropriation in which people, generally low-income, are displaced from their places of residence or their habitat. Such conflicts articulate a series of human rights violations, notably the right to adequate housing, such as the access to the usual means of subsistence and to basic services of communication, electricity, drinking water and basic sanitation. As a consequence, a state of wide vulnerability is evidenced from the non-guarantee of basic rights, which highlights the condition of inequality in the face of procedural legal needs. This theme has become important for investigation in the context of the university extension project developed with the comunidade do Jacó in Natal/RN through the Motyrum de Educação Popular em Direitos Humanos extension project at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, acting mainly in the field of legal and urban assistance since 2016. The community, defined as a Special Area of Social Interest within the scope of the Natal Master Plan and located in the neighborhood of Rocas, is facing an eviction conflict provoked by the municipality since 2018. In this conflict, the barriers to access to justice were mitigated through the judiciary services, such as the Public Defender and Public Prosecution offices. However, it was observed that in the case of Comunidade do Jacó it was not possible to restrict the understanding of access to justice to the condition of judicial services, since there were other factors involved in the process. For example, the actions and strategies developed by the residents, which resulted, at some level, in community organization, in the appropriation of legal concepts, in the understanding of the conflict and in its visibility before society. Due to this, the central research question was defined, that is, how the strategies and actions developed by residents of the comunidade do Jacó assert themselves in the condition of access to justice in the eviction conflict experienced since 2018? Thus, the object of study is expressed in the relationship between access to justice, in a broad conception, and the actions of residents in the forced eviction conflict of the comunidade do Jacó, since 2018. The objective is to reflect on the strategies and actions of subjects of rights in the conflict of forced eviction from the comunidade do Jacó, aiming to understand the experiences of access to justice through social struggle. The spatialized law and the self-constructed law are taken as a reference to analyze the legal spaces revealed by the broad conception of access to justice. It is an articulated work between research, teaching and extension, whose database is supported by an extension project. In conclusion, the actions and strategies developed by the residents of the Jacó community and their achievements in the process of access to justice are highlighted, in the context of the struggle for the right to decent housing in the face of the conflict of forced eviction.