Civil society and legal institutions: thinking about the right to health as a "right alive"

Abstract

The development of the right to health in Brazil has evidenced the diversity of actors and the form through which the plurality of practical has contributed for its improvement. The civil society’s strategy to defend the right to health is related to its perception of the contradictions between the constitutional laws and the concrete practice of the health public policies. In this line, Ehrlich carries through a distinction between the “positive law”, that would be present in the rule of law, and the “vivid law”, that would be fruit of the social dynamics, emphasizing that the right is bigger than the written norm, and is throughitsdaily practices that it’s possible to observe it as a social dynamic of transformation. The ascension of a health policy according to the citizen’s demands passes by the elimination of the failures in meeting and noises in the relations between civil society and State. One of the possible ways in found in the integrated actions between the management, the legal institutions and the civil society. From thedialogue developed by these main actors, strategies have been created to overcome the existing hiatus between the “world of the right” and the “world of the facts”.