ECA (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente)

After democracy returned to Brasil in the late 1980s, many organizations that had struggled against the dictatorship turned to the question of children's rights. Led by the National Movement of Street Children, these organizations wrote, lobbied for, and passed the ECA, a law that forever changed the way that Latin America thinks about children and adolescents.

The law is premised on three bases: that society as a whole has a responsibility toward children, that children are protagonists in their own lives, and that children are national citizens, with special rights appropriate to their condition of development. This law created major changes in social services in Brasil, changes that are still occurring a dozen years after the law was passed. Of equal significance, the ECA has become the model for children's law around Latin America and in some parts of Europe and Africa.

You can read the text of the law (in Portuguese) by clicking here: Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente