Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Mexican constitutional theory has generally mentioned the public order and benefit as the groundwork for the State's assets recovering considered as illegal. What has changed over time are the different hypothesis in which state appropriation can be enforced, some of them go from considering state appropriation as a punishment, authority, right to a faculty. Today the asset recovery, by constitutional mandate, is considered a civil and autonomous act nature through by all means the State must become the possessor of all assets whose legitimate origin cannot be proven. This by all means is a figure whose origin and constitutional proceedings becomes controversial.

The civic action of forfeiture features four elements for its configuration: a) the existence of an illicit act (corresponding to those stated in the Mexican Constitution), b) the existence of good(s) produced by or used in committing those illicit acts, c) the causal link between the first two required elements, and d) that the owner of the good(s) is aware of said unlawful activities. That said, the first element (labeled as the connection point) will be demonstrated independently from the original criminal case; that is, regardless of personal elements such as agent culpability. This reminds of the (criminal) theory of causality, which describes the corpus delicti as "the elements of a typical description that constitute the materiality of a fact". This theory, along with the Finalist and Functionalist approaches, has been present in Mexican criminal regulations. Today, in the criminal realm there is no express reference to any of these; however, the element "illicit act" in the forfeiture action is exactly compatible with that of "corpus delicti."

This article questions the involvement of the fight against corruption and the neoliberal rationality, as well as the consequences brought by this interaction to the criminal procedure, mainly its use as a political tool. This theoretical endeavor is due to the discoveries of Operação Lava Jato, in good part to the use of old and new punitive ideologies that tend to aggravate the criminal justice system and its influence in the political-governmental scenario. Concerning the facts previously mentioned, and considering that corruption cannot be reduced under the suppression of procedural rights and guarantees, this paper aims at showing that the anti-corruption campaigns have been of great relevance to stimulate the neoliberal project. Regarding Brazil, these campaigns have helped prevent the democratization of the penal procedure field.  For this purpose, this paper is going to present the origin of transnationalization of corruption through a bibliographic and documental analysis. In four topics, the present paper is going to demonstrate the connection of anticorruption campaigns to the neoliberals’ intentions, and establish the determinant role played by the fight against corruption, which started in Brazil in 2014, to the strengthen of authoritarian characteristics of the criminal procedure, as well as to its political use.

In this work we investigated how the punitive anti-corruption discourse, which fostered the formation of task forces of the Federal Brazilian Agency for Law Enforcement and Prosecution of Crimes (Federal Prosecution Service), has the potential to compromise the constitutional normative function of this Agency as an institution of guarantees. The original hypothesis is that the task forces bring about a conflict between the efforts to pursue corruption and the fundamental rights established by the Constitution. Because of this, they present potential for political instrumentalization, compromising the constitutional vocation of the Brazilian Agency for Law Enforcement and Prosecution of Crimes. The investigation will be normative and critical. The methodology will be the theoretical approach, from a hypothetical deductive perspective and will have bibliographic sources, but also documentary produced by the Federal Brazilian Agency for Law Enforcement and Prosecution of Crimes (Federal Prosecution Service).

Searches are an example of investigative actions aimed at the discovery of evidence, and failures in conducting them lawfully and reasonably have a direct impact on the admissibility of evidence during a trial. But searches by their nature also significantly interfere with the rights of the individual, which makes them a coercive tool that can very easily deprive a person of their privacy and dignity. For that reason, provisions concerning search must be shaped in a way that will reconcile the effectiveness of the investigation with adequate protection against unlawful searches. One such safeguard is the question of the authority empowered to order searches that will successfully safeguard the rights of the individual. While it is a rule in some countries (e.g. USA and Germany) that the issuing of search warrants remains exclusively in the hands of the judge, some countries (e.g. Poland and Italy) vest that power in the hands of the prosecutor. However, since the majority of searches are conducted without a warrant, it is necessary to analyze in parallel whether the warrantless searches should be left solely to the discretion of the executing authority or whether they should be placed under the more careful scrutiny of another authority. This will be done with the aim of identifying solutions that provide the best protection for a person against unreasonable and disproportionate searches. 

This article analyzes the speeches about corruption in the votes of the Supreme Federal Court, between the years 2015 and 2017. This empirical research has a qualitative character and uses bibliographic and documentary research techniques, through the collection and analysis of Supreme collegiate decisions, referring to the crime of passive corruption. The research is guided by the following problem: which speeches about corruption were mobilized by the ministers of the Supreme Federal Court in the collegiate judgments between the years 2015 and 2017? To position these speeches, the work reflects on central categories of Brazilian social thought, such as “patrimonialism”, questioning their uses by jurists. The Supreme Court's performance is contextualized based on the Mensalão and Lava Jato phenomena and the pressure for certain results exerted on the Court. Relations with the press, pressure from judicial agencies and internal disputes are highlighted as important factors in understanding decisions. 

Italian Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights provide for the reasonable length of proceedings, although they use different expressions. First of all the Author examines this principle as objective and subjective guarantee, as well as its relations with the other constitutional guarantees of fair trial. Then he analyses the main difficulties of the current legislation to realize a speedy and fair justice, by means of official data about number and duration of criminal proceedings. In light of the practical situation, the Author formulates some reform proposals.

The present work consists of a study of the construction of the principle of real truth in the Brazilian penal process and its implications regarding the active legitimacy of the magistrate in the probative production, through the theoretical framework of social practices and the control of Foucaultian discourse. The research problem arose with the observation that after the promulgation of the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil of 1988, the current Code of Criminal Procedure did not undergo significant reforms, and the rules that it lays down on the evidentiary powers of the judge in criminal prosecution persist. The method used is inductive. Finally, it is evident that, from a Foucaultian point of view, in reality the discourse of the search for a real truth is a strategy that is convenient to the institutions that retain criminal jurisdiction, since it represents interests that are unfair to those of the parties and to the purposes of the guarantees and fundamental rights enshrined in the Federal Constitution of 1988.

(A) Being in the City: Performing Arts Walk is a practice-based research project of artistic, performing and interdisciplinary intervention in the streets of Downtown Historic Lima staged in 2018 and 2019. This article shares its conceptual and methodological starting points, centered in the academic discussion about the configuration of the cities and the urban space, in which we take side in the everyday practices and the interactions that they hold, as the axes that configure the city, as well as the performative turn, which values subjectivity in research processes. It also presents this project’s reflexive origin about the being as entity and action, and its research axes that explore dimensions linked to the artistic, performative and knowledge of the city aspects. Finally, it shares the artistic decisions and the creative results to which we arrived.