Following what justice requires

The right to petition in the Independence of Brazil

Abstract

In this article, we consider petitionary devices and its uses in the Independence of Brazil, taking into account both the contemporary political reflection on the meanings of what would come to be called the “right to petition” and the social practices it encompassed. To achieve this goal, we analyze, at first, the debates in the Lisbon Courts about constitutionalizing of the right to petition; then, the discussions in the Constituent Assembly of the Empire of Brazil in 1823, which focused, above all, on the processing and forwarding of petitions. Finally, based on the analysis of the Assembly's documentation, we present a proposal for categorizing the petitions and discuss the specific uses of the mechanism. We defend the hypothesis that the vast majority of petitions that reached the constituent deputies in Rio de Janeiro were, in fact, already known forms of petitioning in the Portuguese Ancien Régime; in addition, we shed light on the fact that many of them have not been processed, it´s a reflection of the overlapping of the projection of one “right to petition” by the existing petitioning practice.