Mediação comunitária: uma forma de se viabilizar o acesso à justiça nas comunidades

Abstract

This paper will present the crisis at the institutionalized means of controversial solution and the subsequent need to adopt new mechanisms of conflict solutions in order to enable access to justice. This term access to justice is understood not only as the right to pursue a legal action but also as the availability of mechanisms that guarantee the rights provided in law. Given this situation, the community mediation is considered as the possibility to enable access to justice as long as it gives empowerment for people, enabling them a higher knowledge of their rights and also self determination to solve their own problems through the application of communication technics. Besides, it helps the community to identify which entity should be requested to solve its conflicts. Moreover, centers and cores of communitarian mediation are able to act directly in order to enable the rights that has been vindicated. They also indicate to the population which external entity should be requested. It is important to say that sometimes those centers and cores of communitarian mediation receive external aid from other partners. In conclusion, in order to prove all that has been mentioned above, it was done a case study of two projects that deal with community mediation: Programa Polos de Cidadania of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and Programa Mediação de Conflitos, wich has been developed by Secretaria de Estado e Defesa Social de Minas Gerais. The methodology applied to this paper was the indirect documentation, represented as the bibliographic and documental research.