Os desafios da exclusão digital e seu impacto no acesso à justiça frente à virtualização dos atendimentos na Defensoria Pública do estado no Tocantins

Abstract

Faced with pressure from neoliberal agendas on Public Administration for efficiency, the Public Defender's Office followed the global trend of virtualizing services and began using the LUNA tool, a virtual assistant implemented in 2018, which allows those assisted to schedule appointments entirely remotely. However, without proper strategic and inclusive planning to cover all social spheres, considering the significant differences between the profile of those assisted in urban centers and those in more rural areas, an alert is raised about the need for the Public Defender's Office to maintain its mission of prioritizing the interests of the underprivileged, even when the context leads to the conclusion that the adoption of technological practices to optimize service to the jurisdictional public is the best alternative. The objective of this research was to evaluate whether the use of these technologies ensures access to justice, taking as a hypothesis the belief that technology is an infallible solution and capable of overcoming the socioeconomic and cultural barriers that affect the effectiveness of these resources. Do beneficiaries living in remote areas – rural areas and those far from major cities – have knowledge about the provision of public services through digital tools and do they have the personal and technical skills to use them? The research raised the issue of how disseminating information about the technologies adopted by the Public Defender's Office and providing instruction on how to operate them can improve access to justice. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to interview 152 people. The objective was to outline the profile of beneficiaries and encourage them to share their thoughts on virtual services and the difficulties they face. With this information, through a dialectical process, taking into account, on the one hand, the ideal situation of promises of ease and closer ties with beneficiaries through virtual services, and on the other, the reality exposed by those who live in the countryside and have a very different socioeconomic profile from those assisted in the capital, we could arrive at a summary of the mechanisms for providing virtual jurisdiction by the Public Defender's Office that were in fact equitable. The data collected reveal that technical limitations and lack of information contribute to the digital exclusion of those assisted. Digital exclusion is part of the context of the denial of the right to access justice and can represent a problem for the guarantee of Human Rights. To answer the research problem, we present this Technical Report structured in four chapters: the first outlines the general parameters of the research and explores the sociocultural context of Tocantins; the second discusses the theme of digital exclusion and the impacts on the vulnerable; the third analyzes the reality of those assisted by the Public Defender's Office of Dianópolis; the fourth suggests, through the technical product, in the form of a standard, changes to Resolution-CSDP No. 217/2021, so that accessibility for digitally excluded people is specifically considered in the implementation of the agency's public policies and, as an emergency measure, also proposes a product in the form of communication, namely, the creation of a video tutorial, which meets the audiovisual requirements, according to the Theory of Mass Communication from the perspective of Critical Theory, for the dissemination of the virtual assistant LUNA, in addition to the study recommending to the institution that it consider the proposal of a pilot district to test new technologies before general implementation in all districts of the state of Tocantins and invest to the extent of its competence in digital literacy policies, in order to minimize the impacts of digital exclusion and expand strategies to guarantee the right to access to justice.