ABSTRACT
National constitutions were part of the formative material, as some fifty of them were included in the background materials, along with national government proposals and one from the American Federation of Lab. Constitutions are assumed to play certain functions, such as defining government institutions, limiting government, or expressing the fundamental values of a people. Brazil's Constitution of 1988 provides that the accused has a right to remain silent, as well as many other criminal procedure protections. This chapter characterizes earlier findings as being consistent with a view of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as both reflective and formative. The UDHR, is therefore in the "neighborhood" of dramatic shifts in the concentration and proliferation of rights in constitutions. Yet the idea of international human rights has become a subject of intense controversy among scholars. Norm crystallization has to do with the degree to which countries converge on the set of rights that are at the core.
