Justiça de transição e responsabilidade de empresas por violações de direitos humanos cometidas na ditadura brasileira (1964-1985)

Abstract

In Brazil, the participation of privately held companies in the construction of the civil-military dictatorship (1965-1985) is a well-known fact. Nevertheless, the country remains a paragon of impunity when it comes to holding businesses accountable for violations of human rights performed in that period. Since, traditionally, transitional justice and corporate accountability on the matter of human rights have been tackled as two different issues, this research has brought the topics closer together with the purpose of scrutinizing how transitional justice’s traditional tools can be implemented towards holding corporations accountable and how contemporary solutions for corporate accountability can be implemented in transitional justice processes and vice versa. For this purpose, initially, we discussed several possible causes for such detachment between both issues, as well as what measures can be elicited from looking at them with closer proximity. Furthermore, we conducted a case study on transitional justice processes in Argentina, a country deemed a leader in the number of initiatives taken towards corporate accountability, and in Colombia, a country just out of a more than 50-year-long internal armed conflict, which is betting on corporate accountability as a means of consolidating peace. Upon identifying the steps taken by those countries, we proceeded with the analysis of Brazilian transitional justice processes and the efficacy of corporate accountability in it, taking into consideration the political, social, economic, cultural, and historical peculiarities of each country and the possible challenges to be tackled.