Resumo:
This research seeks to determine, from a critical-comparative perspective, the extent to which
the Brazilian legal order is effective in addressing the offense of injúria racial (racial insult)
committed in the digital environment and how constitutional and jurisprudential choices
condition those outcomes. The study examines the treatment afforded to injúria racial
perpetrated in cyberspace under Brazilian law and, for illustrative contrast, compares its
reception in the Iberian societies historically responsible for Brazil’s colonization—Portugal
and Spain. To that end, the inquiry adopts structural racism theory as the guiding theoretical
framework for understanding social relations in the three societies, while surveying the
concepts of race and racism and the definitions of cyberspace and cyber-democracy, with a
view to analyzing the exercise of individual liberties online, especially freedom of expression
as constitutionally framed in all three legal systems. The study further analyzes how Brazilian
case law has advanced in its understanding of racial crimes and structural racism, culminating
in the enactment of Law No. 14,532/2023, which reclassifies injúria racial as a form of racism
and, consequently, renders it not subject to statutes of limitation and ineligible for bail.
Moreover, an examination of the evolving jurisprudence of Brazil’s higher courts indicates
progress in the protection of minority groups’ rights. In this sense, by reviewing the legal
sources consolidating racial crimes in the three jurisdictions and emblematic cases on the
subject, the research identifies similarities and differences in the configuration of the offense
of injúria racial when committed in cyberspace, and affirms the working hypothesis that
Brazil is more advanced in its treatment of racial crimes than the countries responsible for its
colonization, which in turn afford greater latitude to freedom of expression when compared to
the Brazilian legal order.
