O papel da defensoria pública em processos estruturais: um estudo da ação civil pública como sua ferramenta de atuação

Abstract

Established by the Federal Constitution of 1988 as a permanent institution and essential to the jurisdictional function of the State, the Public Defender's Office has the constitutional mission of providing full legal assistance, free of charge, to the needy, and thereby promoting the defense of their fundamental rights. The public defender's office is thus guaranteed the use of the procedural tools necessary for the fulfillment of its institutional attributions. However, despite the fact that the Citizen Constitution, by force of the right to access to justice, allows the filing of collective and individual lawsuits, collective lawsuits are still underused in Brazil, in comparison with the innumerous repeated and disconnected individual lawsuits. Thus, this study aims to analyze the role of the Defender institution in structural collective proceedings and to demonstrate how public civil action is an instrument capable of guaranteeing the realization of the fundamental rights of the needy through the procedural initiative of the Public Defender's Office, focusing on the elaboration of the initial petition of the structural procedure by the Public Defender's Office and, thus, potentiating the Defender's action in the transformation of our reality. To this end, the methodology used in this study will be bibliographic and documentary research, based on the collection of data in books, dissertations, articles, legislation and court decisions. To prove the intended objective, it is presented, in practice, a public civil action proposed by the Union Public Defender’s Office in Mossoró, in defense of the right to health. It is concluded, therefore, that it is through structural public civil action that it is possible that the Office of the Public Defender intervenes in a more comprehensive and effective way to achieve empirically significant results in defending the fundamental rights of the needy.