Brazil has a vast legislation that treats fundamental rights, principally from the promulgation of the Federal Constitution, in October 1988. After a long period of exception, the Constitution guaranteed a large number of individual and collective rights, and this fact was of great importance, because it allowed of rights and not favors. But these rules do not reach the effectiveness expected of a law. There is a vacuum, a deep abyss between these rules, the result of historical and constant struggles of the organized civil society, and their effectiveness. I try to think about and to point to the possible causes of this distance, of this emptiness that exists between the rules and their effectiveness. In the same way that human rights are a human construction, the achievement of their effectiveness will also be the result of a construction, forged in the struggles of the organized people in search of the guarantee of their rights.