Ana Côrtes, Juliana Jaramillo (2024)
Revista Direito GV
Ana de Mello Côrtes is a Queer rights researcher and activist, a fellow at LawTransform (CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation), and an affiliated researcher at the University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research. Juliana Jaramillo is a PhD candidate in Development Studies at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia, and a LawTransform fellow. Ana de Mello Côrtes and Juliana Jaramillo are a part of the South-South Network, a group dedicated to amplifying the voices of Global South researchers in crucial socio-legal debates. Read their full article here.
Abstract:
Brazil and Colombia are outstanding cases of rights recognition through courts. However, when it comes to comprehensive sex education (CSE), the legal battles in these countries have experienced notably different moments. Drawing on judicial cases from the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court and the Colombian Constitutional Court, we identify the actors involved in the legal battles over CSE and show how the legal opportunity structure (i.e., the configuration of power, the access to the courts, the systems of alliance and conflicts, and the availability of legal frames) shaped the course and outcomes of the legal mobilization that took place in these countries in different ways. For this, we work with document analysis of court case files and consider a sample established in February 2023 containing 9 cases from Brazil and 24 cases from Colombia. We argue that (i) the Colombian court is much more open to civil society than the Brazilian court, resulting in a broader and more diversified use of litigation, and that (ii) the different configuration of political power has led the Brazilian mobilization to assume a feature of resistance to conservative attacks on CSE, while in Colombia, litigation has become a tool for expanding the right to sex education and protecting LGBTQ students.
https://www.scielo.br/j/rdgv/a/zH7FZM8qjjM3sHssts4jTdw/?lang=en