The Ambivalent Criminal Control of Universal Citizenship: Analysis of the Brazilian Case

The construction of a new legal subject arises as an irreducible consequence of the global, cosmopolitan and multicultural way of life. This process is facilitated by the emergence of a universal citizenship, resulting from the normative consolidation of legal guarantees, arising from the universalization of rights and the relativization of sovereignty in the post-World War II period (ARENDT). The dilution of the imperative ties between the State and the citizen that characterize this process, however, did not prevent reactions from the criminal control systems in charge of the State, which began to expand to the inter-state level. In fact, criminal control, once exercised only over the citizen who was within the limits of a State by pressure of normative sovereignty, now broke the national borders. This process of increasing punitive power through the communication, transfer and delegation of penal power between States dilutes the sovereign limits of punishment and materializes itself in order to limit universal citizenship. This is evidenced at the international level by the construction of a universal punitive power based on both the experiences of international criminal courts and the strengthening of the ties of international criminal cooperation between national jurisdictions. At the same time, at the national level, the preventive proposal of crime is materialized in the uncontested emergence of an even closer immigrant control network, in spite to the international determinations that demand the opening of borders as a form of guarantee of human rights. The present work intends to demonstrate this reality of growth of control as a response to universal citizenship with the analysis of the Brazilian case and its increasing binding to the construction of a system of universal criminal repression on the one hand and, on the other, the definition of a restrictive legislation and qualification of foreigners and immigrants.