Brasília, 11/5/2003 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - Although the Brazilian constitution is only 15 years old it has received 46 amendments. And at the moment, there are dozens of other proposed amendments in congress. Those facts are seen as evidence that much of the 1988 Constitution is out of date and needs to be adopted to a different reality - in the world and in Brazil.
In a speech during commemorations of the anniversary of the constitution in the Senate, former minister of Justice, Paulo Brossard, declared that the problem is that the Brazilian constitution is very analytical. "Many of the more than two thousands provisions in the constitution should be a part of ordinary legislation," he said.
The man who wrote the final text of the constitution, Bernardo Cabral, said that there were too many amendments, too many attempts to change the constitution, which was a document that was not supposed to be at the mercy of whoever was in power. Cabral pointed out that the constitution was drawn up "just before the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, before the wave of globalization, and has to be adopted to a new reality." He pointed out that the constitution had a provision for a revision after five years, but that had not happened.
Former senator, Jose Fragoso, and the present leader of the PMDB in the Senate, Renan Calheiros (AL), who both helped write the constitutional text, agree that it goes into too much detail and a lot of it is obsolete. It was recalled that the leader of the constitutional assembly, Ulysses Guimarães, said the constitution was an unfinished project that needed to be adopted to new times.
According to political scientist, Paulo Kramer, the constitution of 1988 was written looking through a rearview mirror at the military dictatorship [which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985]. "As a matter of fact," said Kramer, "every Brazilian constitution has been written against something, as an attack on the past. During the Imperial there was a constitution against the colonial period; during the First Republic the constitution was against the Imperial, and so forth. The result is that Brazilian constitutions suffer from almost instanteous obsolescence. The great sin of 1988 was to try to constitutionalize almost everything." (AB)
