Direitos humanos e dominação: a ONU no espelho

Abstract

The thesis presented is that there is a disparity between the speeches about peoples' equality and self-determination and the praxis of the international relations through United Nations (UN), especially in its Security Council (SC). The central question for this research was if UN speeches about human rights, mainly regarding peoples’ equality and self-determination, align with its effective actions, especially focusing on its SC. After analyzing the research’s results, it was verified that the system of international relations and human rights stands for a continuous past-present of a bourgeois liberal system of fetishism and exploitation. Such order is proposed as civilizatory and universal and is today reproduced acritically, notwithstanding the permanence of power iniquities inside UN itself. Through methodological triangulation of literature review, documents analysis and content analysis, the research aimed to investigate the fitting between UN speeches about international law and human rights, especially regarding equality among peoples/nations, and its real actions. Specifically, along the chapters, this thesis analyzed the speeches built around international law, human rights and equality among peoples considering the civilizational process, colonial/post-colonial/decolonial and imperialism theories. Then, the work attempted to understand the articulation between universality and equality speeches in this area. Finally, it discussed the performance of that organization when it comes to international law, human rights and the effectiveness of international relations' horizontality, respect to peoples’ equality and self-determination. From concepts such as domination, iniquity and coloniality, reality was confronted with the historical axis of human rights: liberty, equality and fraternity. The content analysis of SC's documents, such as protocols, minutes and vetoes, allowed the elucidation of the power relations that perpetuate in new names and shapes, but without big differences when compared to the practices of colonialism and imperialism of past centuries. The continuous past-present that had been foreseen as hypothesis for this work was thus confirmed through the methodological triangulation that was adopted. The conclusion is that the civilizatory progress, under bourgeois liberal command cannot, for its own nature, reach its self-proclaimed ideals (over which the whole thing has been built), or at least not for everyone in the planet. The idea of universalization is then innocent, utopic or, in the worst case, a mere decoy to sustain a system that is intrinsically unfair. In it, only a few humans have effective human rights. The strongest international institution (UN) is not able to change such an order, once it has been structured inside and from this very order and has, in its own body, iniquities among its members. As long as this structuring inequality holds strong, one cannot expect UN to have a revolutionary role in history.