Democracy is not for the faint-hearted… It requires hard work, constant  attention, takes a lot of time to build and can easily be undermined by  political polarization, regressive campaign finance rules and deficient laws on  political representation. This month, two major events shed light on both the  successes and failings of Brazil’s quarter century old, vibrant democracy.

On October 7, municipal elections brought over 115m voters to the polls to  elect mayors and councilors in 5,568 cities and towns. A few days later, the  country’s Supreme Court returned guilty verdicts in the largest trial of political  corruption in Brazilian history.

The municipal elections were the first since the adoption of a new law  barring candidates with criminal records. Cast in electronic ballot boxes, votes  were tallied and results were published four hours after voting booths closed.  There were no legal challenges. In 50 municipalities, including 17 of the 26  states capitals, where no candidate cleared the absolute majority of 50 per cent  plus one, the two top candidates will go into a second round on October 28. The  top prize is São Paulo, Brazil’s economic capital and home to the country’s  third largest public budget.

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This move demonstrates the continued rise of Brazilian blacks in a nation known quite often for its desire to ignore race. While some would say ignoring race is a positive, it is all but clear to any visitor to Brazil, that large numbers of Blacks life in desperate poverty and powerlessness. Given Brazil has the largest population of African descent, second only to Nigeria, this stark reality about Black live has lead intellectuals for decades to question Brazil’s claim to being a “racial democracy” where one’s race does not ultimately decide one’s future.

Hopefully, Barbos’ appointment will help motivate young and old Blacks and those who care about the future of all Brazilians.

It must also be noted that Barbos’ appointment is significant because he does hail from an impoverished background. He is an inspiration for all of those who seek to work to achieve success in a nation known for its deep gulf between the haves and have nots.

Brazilians are so used to impunity, especially when it comes to the legendary corruption in their political system, that they often employ a fatalistic maxim to describe it: The police arrest; the courts set free.

But for weeks now, Brazilians have been riveted by the televised spectacle at the nation’s high court, in which justices are sparring over what is arguably Brazil’s largest corruption scandal. When the dust settles and sentences are announced, prominent politicians and bankers may actually go to jail.

The fact the trial is even advancing to such a phase — taking aim at congressmen, members of the governing party and senior officials who worked directly under one of the most popular presidents — points to a rare breakthrough in political accountability and a crucial streak of independence in the legal system.

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In the magical realist world of the Rio de Janeiro carnival, the last character one might expect to see portrayed in the festivities would be from the arcane sphere of Brazil’s supreme court.

But craftsmen in the city have begun churning out masks ahead of next February’s carnival in the likeness of Joaquim Barbosa. This is in homage to the important role that the court’s only black judge is playing in the country’s biggest corruption case.

Justice Barbosa is in charge of the so-called mensalão trial of alleged vote-buying in congress, whose suspects include senior members of the government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

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Today, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF) commenced the chapter of the trial having to do with the accusation that mensalão funds were used to ensure parliamentary support of the Lula administration. The scheme was commanded by Lula’s former chief-of-staff, José Dirceu, with the help of ten other politicians.

In the past 23 sessions of the trial, the Supreme Court testified that there was misuse of public money, mixed with bank loans, to fund the scheme. Ten of the 37 defendants have already received sentences and three were acquitted.

In the phase that begins today, the ministers of the court will decide whether the embezzled money was used to buy support of the National Congress, as claimed by the prosecution from the Attorney General’s Office.

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Construction on a mammoth hydroelectric dam in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest resumed Tuesday, hours after the country’s Supreme Court ordered a resumption of work on the project that has been strongly opposed by Indian groups and environmentalists.

The ruling by Supreme Court President Carlos Ayres Britto late Monday overturned an order handed down earlier this month by a lower court that suspended work on the $11 billion, 11,000-megawatt Belo Monte hydroelectric dam until indigenous communities living in the area are consulted.

The Norte Energia consortium, which is building Belo Monte, said in a statement that work on the dam resumed Tuesday morning.

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Brazil’s Supreme Court has approved the resumption of work on the huge Belo Monte dam in the Amazon, which was halted earlier this month after protests from indigenous groups.

The preliminary ruling on Monday overturns an earlier ruling that ordered construction of the dam across the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, to be stopped until indigenous peoples can testify before Congress.

However, the decision by Supreme Court President Carlos Ayres Britto could be revised when the court examines the case further, its website said.

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To the suits in Brasília, it’s simply Penal Action Case 470. For everyone else in Brazil, it’s the trial of the century. Known colloquially as the mensalão—the monthly payoff scandal—the case will decide the fortunes of some three dozen high-profile former government officials and prominent executives who stand accused of a farrago of felonies, from money laundering to buying votes.

More than the fate of the 37 defendants, however, the case currently unfolding in the Supreme Court—and being followed gavel to gavel in real time by millions of Brazilians—will also say a great deal about the rule of law and the quality of democracy in Latin America’s most powerful country.

Togaed and taciturn, Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court justices haven’t been under this much scrutiny since the trial of disgraced former president Fernando Collor de Mello, who in 1992 resigned under a cloud of misdeeds (though he was eventually cleared of corruption). And yet the scope and impact of the mensalão—according to prosecutors it stretched from the national Congress to the presidential palace—is potentially far more devastating.

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Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the release of an Amazon rancher charged with being one of the masterminds of the 2005 killing of American nun and rain forest activist Dorothy Stang.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday night that Regivaldo Galvao has the right to remain freepending the outcome of his appeal process.

In 2010, a jury found Regivaldo Galvao guilty of ordering Stang’s death and sentenced him to 30 years in jail. But he was freed on appeal.

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You have to give credit to Brazil for what it’s doing to combat corruption and solve the worst political scandal in the country’s recent history.

It’s not unusual for Latin American countries to prosecute politicians for real or imagined corrupt practices: in fact, most new governments go after their political rivals from preceding governments as soon as they can. But Brazil is doing something much more noteworthy: it is prosecuting prominent leaders of the ruling party.

Thirty-eight top officials and allies of President Dilma Rousseff and former President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers Party, including former Lula da Silva all-powerful chief of staff Jose Dirceu, are being tried before Brazil’s Supreme Court for diverting public funds to buy votes in Congress between 2002 and 2005.

The defense in Brazil’s biggest ever bribery trial on Monday rejected charges against the main defendants and asked that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence.

Thirty-eight former ministers, lawmakers, businessmen and bankers face prosecution before the Supreme Court over alleged vote-buying in Congress from 2002 to 2005 during the first term of president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

None of the 38 accused have been arrested, and none were in court.

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Seven years after politicians were accused in a vote-buying scheme, Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday started the trial of 38 people suspected of involvement in the scandal.

Eleven Supreme Court justices started the hearings in the capital city of Brasilia.

The defendants are accused of using public funds to pay lawmakers monthly bribes for their support during the first government of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in 2005.

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Brazil’s top court has backed sweeping affirmative action programs used in more than 1,000 universities across the nation, which has more blacks than nearly any other country, yet where a severe gap in education equality between races persists.

The Supreme Court voted 7-1 vote late Thursday to uphold a federal program that has provided scholarships to hundreds of thousands of black and mixed-race students for university studies. Its constitutionality was challenged by the right-of-center DEM political party. Three justices abstained from the vote.

The court ruled last week in a separate case that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas in determining who is admitted.

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Allison Fisher: How would you compare the transitional processes in Brazil with those in Chile and Argentina?

Anthony Pereira: I think the striking thing about Brazil is that very little was done officially for a very long time after the transition in Brazil, whereas in Argentina there was an immediate reaction from the civilian government that came after the military. Argentina’s congress immediately annulled the amnesty that the military had given itself, and under Raúl Alfonsín they had trials, then a truth commission: the Sábato Commission. So there was a lot of activity immediately after military rule, where the government assumed responsibility for violations of human rights and the government tried to address these violations through well-known mechanisms. Chile is a little more subdued, but a truth commission was formed right away—the Rettig Commission. Trials didn’t come in the initial period, but there was a judicial reinterpretation of the Amnesty Law in the 1990s that led to some trials. So in Chile (maybe to a lesser extent than in Argentina) to a considerable extent there is this commitment to addressing human rights issues, coupled with the official mechanisms of transitional justice put into place.

What you get in Brazil is this very informal pact that was really created when Tancredo Neves was campaigning for the presidency in ‘84—a pact basically not to do anything. I don’t want to give the impression that there was no transitional justice in Brazil in that early phase, but it was all coming from outside the state. For example, there is a kind of quasi-truth commission. There’s a book published in the spring of ‘85 called Brasil Nunca Mais (which is the same title as the Argentine report), but Brasil Nunca Mais is entirely done by the Church and by the World Consulate of Churches. It was the Church’s own investigation based on the military court trials of the 1960s and 70s, and it got a lot of publicity and sold well as a book. But with respect to the government: there was nothing the government said, no truth commission, no trials, no real pronouncement.

It’s really not until 1996, with the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, that you get something. You get a Ministry of Justice, investigations of the dead and disappeared,  but these measures took, you know, about ten to twelve years after military rule to be implemented. So the really interesting question about Brazil is: Why is it so different? There are lots of different theories about that. I guess another thing that I would point to in Brazil (and maybe this confirms what some people say), is even if you completely ignore these issues, they never go away. The other point is how salient these issues still are in Brazil. President Dilma just signed into law last October the creation of a truth commission, so the State created a truth commission, and now they have to appoint the people who will serve two years on the commission. So I would call Brazilian mechanisms late justice, not transitional justice. The transition is over, and has been for a long time. So, there’s a lot of interesting work on why Brazil is different, but that is what it is: different.

AF: As you point out, the truth commission is being instituted almost thirty years after the transition to democracy. What, in your opinion, are the implications of such a lengthy delay?

AP: It’s less likely that this kind of commission will lead to any trials because of the age of the people involved and the time gap. Argentina has probably gone the farthest with trials; there are some effective trials in Chile as well. This came up at a conference on the quality of democracy in Brazil that I attended in London last October. We brought the Minister of Justice, José Cardoso (who didn’t say this), but some of the commentators said that if the Truth Commission produces reliable information on human rights abuses, with specific information on the perpetrators, someone could try to charge those individual perpetrators. Now, the Supreme Court has upheld the amnesty, so that might be shot down; it might not go anywhere. These trials could try to effect various changes, but the scope for that possible change is more limited than, say, if had been done 20 years ago. You’re talking about people who were very young in the 1970s; they’re going to be older than me, so they’re going to be old. They’re not particularly plausible defendants, so the whole process is going to be limited. I think another interesting thing to note about the Truth Commission, though, is the time period selected for investigation is a compromise. It’s not 1964 or 1961 but it’s ’45, I believe. So the commissioners could go back to purges in the armed forces in the 1950s over ideological issues, where there’s a lot to investigate. I have a feeling they won’t, but they could.

AF: Given that Brazil is already a consolidated democracy, does it make sense to speak of transitional justice in this case, since Brazil is no longer in transition? And to what extent is Brazil atypical from a transitional justice standpoint?

AP: I think it’s probably fair to call it late justice, but in some ways this term is semantic: no term would be completely satisfactory because justice delayed is justice denied. So if it’s late justice it’s not really justice. We therefore have a problem as to what to call this.

I had an interesting encounter once with José Gregori, who is a human rights activist from Brazil. He was Secretary of Human Rights and, in the book I published in 2005, I had a chapter comparing transitional justice in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. It’s a very mechanistic chapter in which I just take this checklist and say, we’ve got these major mechanisms: we’ve got truth commissions, trials, reparations, etc. So we take those items on the list and say Chile and Argentina have more of those, while Brazil has almost nothing except for reparations. In fact, this is something interesting about Brazil. I think it’s been about ten years, and [the reparations] are phenomenal. I think Brazil has spent more money on reparations than any other country. So that is the outstanding feature of their transitional justice process. But if you just look at the checklist, Brazil comes out very low. José Gregori told me we didn’t make the transition to democracy in a classroom; history was happening all around us, we had to make decisions, we had to craft the best kind of democracy we could, and we thought the compromise on amnesty was worth it. So Gregori defended the transition, even though he valued human rights. Probably in an ideal world he would have wanted a little more accountability, but he was defending the way it was done in Brazil. He didn’t say this—but I suppose he would have—that the scale of human rights abuses was lower, at least in terms of lethal violence, maybe not torture.

What I tried to argue in my book is that, unlike Chile and Argentina, in Brazil the government’s opponents were usually dealt with—a lot of them were dealt with—through the legal system and military courts, but that certainly doesn’t explain all the idiosyncrasies and the Brazilian way of doing transitional justice. So even if people were picked up and tortured, if they were considered a serious suspect, they were tried in military courts in a system that was a hybrid system involving civilian judges and appealed to the civilian Supreme Court. This was seen as continuous with Brazilian traditions because this military justice system had existed way before. Created in the 1930s, its jurisdiction had been amplified by the second institutional act in ‘65, but this was a very formalistic, legalistic way of dealing with this, and yes, some people were illegally and clandestinely disappeared, but their number is quite small in Brazil compared the number prosecuted in courts.

What you have then is an establishment, a justice system—at least part of the justice system and the military—that is committed to this official record of what happened. I argue this created a bias after the transition to the status quo, because both the military justice system and the armed forces were invested in these institutions and defended the way these institutions worked. They defended them right into the 80s and 90s saying they had done a good job dealing with the subversion, whereas in Chile, for example, there was this sense in the Concertación—the coalition government that came in during the 90s—that the judiciary had badly let Chile down. They had gone along with torture and killing, the Supreme Court had had the right to challenge the military court to proceeding what Pinochet used and never did—the court never reviewed a single case. So there was this sense in Chile that they had to reform the judiciary, that the judiciary had been seriously remiss. In Argentina, they had that same feeling. In Argentina, they actually replaced the entire Supreme Court, as in all the other transitions.

So I do believe there is an institutional story to be told and that it explains some of the inertia in Brazil, because you had a repression that was legalistic, and I think it did provide some control—it controlled the security apparatus quite a bit. The flip side of that coin is that it was difficult to reform it, to disentangle it, to point the finger and say there was a failure here in terms of protection of human rights, and this failed apparatus must reform. Really all that happens in 1979 is the military courts no longer have that jurisdiction anymore, but at least by ’85 the courts go back to simply trying crimes committed by the military and carry on. The legal validity of those cases was never overturned. For me, to the extent that I identify myself theoretically in the social sciences, institutionalism makes a lot of sense. If you look at those institutions, they are different and they really do perform differently. Argentina was probably the least institutionalized; they really just went around the judiciary. The regime had no interest in trying its opponents; it just “disappeared” them; they simply decided they were going to use extralegal means. Chile is sort of between Argentina and Brazil in that respect, but I do think the institutional history gives you some insight, although it doesn’t explain everything.

AF: In the absence of criminal trials, a few families have initiated civil suits requesting declaratory sentences against accused perpetrators, like the Almeida Teles suit against Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. What is the purpose of these civil suits?

AP: I think they identify the perpetrator, and there’s a sort of shaming that comes along with that. I am not familiar with what these declaratory sentences say but they certainly receive coverage in the press, so in the same way that the trials of the dissidents and the opponents under the military dictatorship tried to kind of shame those defendants and make an official story about what they had done, these kinds of judgments may go some way towards teaching people in the society at large what happened. That there were these human rights abuses, and there have been these perpetrators identified. That’s another thing. I don’t want to imply that because there hasn’t been a lot of official transitional justice, at least when it comes to the Truth Commissions and trials, that that means there hasn’t been some justice. For example, Brazil Nunca Mais named about four hundred perpetrators. These kinds of civil trials also identify perpetrators. That’s important: we don’t want to reify the State and say only the State can make a difference in these issues. It is just as important what people do on the civil side, what people do in their organizations. Dilma Rousseff, the new president—or she’s been in power since 2011—forbade the military from commemorating the coup in the military corps, for the first time, in 2011. That is an example. It’s a form of justice in that it doesn’t allow the commemoration of that event anymore. And I don’t think it was widely applauded in military clubs, but they obeyed it, so that’s important. That was a symbolic stepping forward.

AF: In 2010 the Supreme Court decided by a 7-2 vote that the Amnesty Law should continue to extend to security agents. In your opinion, does this ruling permanently foreclose the possibility of criminal prosecution?

AP: Like I said, I don’t think so. I mean we know that in Chile there was a creative interpretation by some judges where they decided that crimes of disappearance, because they constituted an ongoing crime, were not counted by the amnesty. So someone can try that in Brazil.* The most famous case we have of disappearance is the case of the Araguaia disappearances. There were about fifty-nine or sixty of them, and I think very few if any of their remains have been found. So you could have that kind of ruling. Some jurists in Brazil cite international law, and argue that even though the Supreme Court has upheld the amnesty, it still has no standing in international law. So the amnesty could still be challenged at some level either in Brazil, or more likely outside of Brazil, in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. For example, there was a ruling, I think it was the Inter-American Commission, in a case from Araguaia, where the commission decided that Brazil had not done enough to try to identify the remains. I think it was Gomes Lund and was decided on a year ago. There is a working group: I know Paulo Abraão, who’s number two in the Ministry of Justice in Brazil, he has a commission where he’s working with the armed forces and the Ministry of Justice to respond to this Gomes Lund case, to try to find his remains. So I don’t think it precludes judicial action. There is an interesting MA thesis by a guy called Marcelo Torelli (who’s also at the Amnesty Commission with the Ministry of Justice in Brazil) and in this thesis he tried to criticize the judicial reasoning in this Supreme Court case. I’m not a legal scholar—so I’m not sure how many other people share his view—but it does seem plausible to me that a lot of people don’t really agree with the reasoning of amnesty. But I think it’s ultimately a political decision. The Supreme Court members don’t want to overturn it, and don’t want responsibility for opening that can of worms. It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be challenged. There’s an interesting article by Kathryn Sikkink called the “Justice Cascade,” and what she argues is that the important changes in transitional justice come about partly when actors in a country are willing to go outside. So the Pinochet extradition, for example, and there have been civil cases in the U.S. and people accused of torture in Latin America, and what happens is that when something happens outside, it sometimes forces action inside the country.

This happened with Pinochet, when he was originally detained in London. People were saying this will destabilize Chilean democracy, please don’t do this, because this will lead to polarization in Chile. In fact what happened was the exact opposite: he was finally released, the Senate stripped him from his seat for life, a judge investigated him, the rightwing party didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore (and that was partly because they found out he had a bank account in Washington). So something outside can lead to change in the inside. And you can kind of play with those different levels of jurisdiction. So if there is a challenge it might first go outside, and then see if there’s a reaction inside. I argue with some of my lawyer friends because I think at this stage, there is a tendency for people to think “well, if the trial is the ultimate force, when someone in the DOPS is being prosecuted or accused of human rights abuse [then we’ll have justice].” Yet I think that if Brazil never gets to that place, if it never has trials, it doesn’t mean that something meaningful hasn’t taken place, and I don’t think we should make that a litmus test for credible transitional justice. It depends what the country is going through and I think that there are other things to be done that would be a lot more meaningful than trials. For example: if they can get information of Araguaia, which is a big missing link in our understanding of the oppression in Brazil, that would be very meaningful. In some ways, to me, that is more valuable than a particular old guy getting prosecuted. In Brazil too, I think there may be limits to what you can do for prosecuting these people.

* Note: This interview was conducted before federal prosecutors filed charges against Colonel Sebastião Curió Rodrigues de Moura using precisely the argument that Pereira mentions here, that of ongoing crimes (crimes continuados).

The Brazilian Supreme Court will decide next Wednesday whether continuous crimes are an exception to the Amnesty Law. The controversy arose when federal prosecutors tried to file criminal charges against Colonel Sebastião Curió Rodrigues de Moura, who is accused of kidnapping five guerrillas in the Araguaia region during the dictatorship. The OAB is challenging the law, stating that since the bodies of the individuals have not been found, the crimes are ongoing. It is already being predicted, however, that the Supreme Court will reject this reasoning. Read more about case here and here.

Oliveira explains that the Supreme Court recently determined that two foreign military officers—one Uruguayan, the other Argentine—could be extradited to Argentina because the crimes for which they stand accused (relating to political disappearances) are ongoing until the bodies of the victims are located, and hence there is no statute of limitation. The decision has created an opening for trying Brazilian security agents under the same logic. According to federal prosecutor André Raupp, the charges against Curió are only a first step, and could lead to the investigation of other accused perpetrators. Whether this happens remains to be seen.

The fact that charges were filed first against Curió is symbolic because the five cases of political disappearance involved are all linked to the the extermination of a guerrilla training camp in the remote Araguaia region. Recently, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled the Brazilian State responsible for the disappearances of over 60 guerrillas in the Araguaia case and found that the 1979 Amnesty Law violated international treaties of which Brazil is a signatory. The international court’s ruling has generated external pressure on the Brazilian State to address dictatorship human rights crimes.  (Thanks to Idelber for forwarding us Oliveira’s article).

The 5 May 2011 was an historic day for the rights of lesbians and gay men in Brazil. The country’s supreme court ruled unanimously that partnerships between same-sex couples must be recognised as being equal in every legal aspect to partnerships between unmarried heterosexual couples. Prior to the ruling some, but not all, public notaries would register a document stating that the couple lived together. Such documents did not, however, have guaranteed legal value, were subject to interpretation and could be disregarded. Same-sex couples could also take their claim to court, requiring legal recognition of their partnerships. For the most part, such cases were judged by the civil courts and not the family courts, and were regarded as a business partnership – only protecting assets, rather than a relationship of love and affection, with its ensuing rights and obligations.

All notaries are now obliged to register, when requested, same-sex partnerships as a legally recognised “family entity”, just as they do with heterosexual couples. This opens the way for a series of rights previously denied to same-sex couples in Brazil, such as joint adoption of children, inheritance, the consideration of both partners’ income when applying for loans or mortgages or the right for one partner to take decisions regarding the other’s medical treatment in cases of incapacity. The ruling also brings obligations that did not previously exist for same-sex couples in the event of separation.

The matter was taken to the supreme court by the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2008, after its recognition of the same-sex partners of state government civil servants as dependants was challenged at the local level. The federal government’s attorney general’s office added weight to the battle in 2009, by filing a claim that the failure to recognise same-sex partnerships in Brazil was unconstitutional. Last Thursday’s ruling found in favour of both cases.

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Wikipedia’s anyone-can-edit philosophy is not as chaotic as I thought and also not as democratic as I imagined. The concept of “encyclopedia” has changed over the years due to changes in the way content is produced and delivered. Now, anyone can publish information about current events as soon as they happen, and this makes modern encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, very much like media outlets’ breaking news.

For instance, as we saw in class, the entry 7 July 2005 London bombings was created soon after the detonation of bombs occurred, and people immediately started to add information to it – which is a never-ending process (most recent update was done today, November 10!). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia being written at the same time History happens, and due to its nature it’s understandable that the quality of Wikipedia’s entries varies a lot and depends on 1) the entry being a recent event, or not (recent events are more likely to be incomplete or poor, but they have potential to be improved); and on 2) having experts who would share their knowledge and kindly add information to the entries.

As soon as an event happen, journalists may know as little as Wikipedia contributors, but, as the story develops, media outlets are more effective because journalists are very well connected to credible sources of information, and they have credentials (for example, being a NYTimes reporter), or a solid professional reputation, which helps them to access and provide accurate information.

I like the idea of giving “voice” to people share information on Wikipedia. The problem is that Wikipedia works best exactly as a community of people who share knowledge (without going into the merit of the accuracy of knowledge) than as an encyclopedia, or accurate source of information. Wikipedia is more focused on the means (creating and sharing content) than on the outcomes (providing accurate information). And accuracy is essential when it comes to information; inaccurate information has no value.

Thus, the disadvantage of an open source of information is that it tends to be shallow: quantity (number of entries) and growing horizontally prevails over quality and growing vertically. This relates to the fact that today we have the opportunity – and the demand – to create and distribute content faster than the available time to inquiry and verify information. It’s true that this also affects media outlets, but they usually have more effective techniques to verify information within a short period of time than Wikipedia’s contributors do.

Quick note: On July 7, 2009, the Brazilian Supreme Court waived the requirement that someone must have a college degree in Journalism in order to be allowed to work as a journalist (by the way, poor me). Literally, in Brazil anyone can be a journalist.

Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended starting Friday the rule banning radio and television comedians and programs from producing political satire about parties and their candidates in the October election.

The preliminary decision was made late Thursday, when Supreme Court judge Ayres Britto ruled that the 1997 law does not warrant censorship of Brazilian media. That would be unconstitutional, the judge said.

He further argued that the electoral process is not a state of emergency, the only situation that would warrant restricting freedom of opinion.

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Brazil’s supreme court on Wednesday voted to extradite an Italian ex-militant, Cesare Battisti, wanted for multiple murders dating from the 1970s, despite a government order granting him political asylum.

The court was continuing constitutional deliberations to decide whether its verdict was final, or whether President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva should have the final say in the case.

Chief justice Gilmar Mendes cast the decisive vote, breaking a deadlock among his eight colleagues that had dragged the extradition hearing out over more than two months.

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By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, Latin America Correspondent

SAO PAULO, June 7, 2009

The Brazilian Supreme Court and a lower appeals court have nullified two sentences against child sex abusers in recent months on the grounds that their behavior did not constitute a crime under Brazilian law, sparking a protest from the United Nations.

On June 23, Brazil’s Superior Tribunal of Justice (the nation’s Supreme Court for cases not involving Constitutional law) upheld the acquittal of several men who had paid two girls, 12 and 13 years of age, to have sexual intercourse with them, on the grounds that prostitution was not covered by child sex abuse statutes.

The men, one of whom has been identified as a Brazilian sports celebrity, reportedly took photos of the encounter.

Although the fact that the men engaged in sexual intercourse with the girls was apparently not in doubt, the Tribunal of Justice of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul had ruled that it was not a crime, because the girls were engaged in prostitution. Brazil’s Superior Tribunal agreed, upholding the lower court ruling.

“The prostitutes waited for the client in the street, and are no longer people who enjoy a good image in society,” the judge ruled in the original case, adding that “prostitution is such an old profession and is considered to be barely a moral abuse, but never a crime subject to penalty.”

Ariel de Castro Alves, a member of Brazil’s National Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, expressed horror at the ruling.

“The decision is almost a license for abuse and exploitation to be committed without punishment. Currently, cases like these are difficult to punish,” she told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. “It is a difficult process, that involves impediments, and very often, threats against the victims and their families. When punishment is possible, we have an absurd decision like this.”

The decision is also being denounced by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“As incredible as it may seem, the argument used is that the accused did not commit a crime, because the children had been sexually exploited before by other people,” the organization commented in a public statement.

“Moreover, the decision causes indignation, because of the insensitivity of the judiciary regarding the circumstance of vulnerability to which the girls are subject,” the statement continued. “The case also establishes a dangerous precedent: that sexual exploitation is acceptable when it is paid for, as if our children are for sale in the perverse market of adult power.”

In a second case, reported in Brazil on June 5 by legal commentator Renato Pacca, an appeals court in the state of Rio Grande do Sul overturned the conviction of a 30-year-old man who admitted that he had had anal sex with his 13-year-old brother.

According to the prosecutor, the accused, who has not been named in the Brazilian media, “through real and presumed violence, forced his three minor brothers who were 9, 12, and 13 years of age, to practice various libidinous acts of sexual intercourse during the time period in question, consisting in showing them pornographic films, submitting them to various sexual services, and practicing anal coitus.”

Although the accused confessed to molesting his 13-year-old brother, and although he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, he was absolved on appeal to the Fifth Criminal Chamber of the state’s Tribunal of Justice because the child had “requested it.”

According to the text of the judgment, “sexual promiscuity was the tonic of domestic life, and this reality is sufficiently attested by the natural way the topic was confronted by the supposed victims.”

The 13 year old “effectively consented to have sexual relations with his brother” the court said, by “sitting on the lap of his brother, arguing that ‘I knew that was wrong’ and that, in the act, he had the role of the woman and the accused the role of the man.”

Prosecutors appealed the case to the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, which, in contrast to the other, similar case regarding the two girls, overturned the appeals court ruling and restored the original sentence.

Contact Information:

Embassy of Brazil in the USA
3006 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
20008-3634
Phone: (202) 238-2700
Fax: (202) 238-2827
Email: ambassador@brasilemb.org

Embassy of Brazil in Canada
450 Wilbrod Street
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6M8
Phone: (613) 237-1090 or (613) 755-5160
Fax: (613) 237-6144
E-mail: mailbox@brasembottawa.org

Embassy of Brazil in the United Kingdom
32 Green Street
London W1K 7AT
Phone: 020 73999000
Fax: 020 73999100
Email: info@brazil.org.uk

Embassies of Brazil to other Nations: http://www.embassyworld.com/embassy/Brazil/Brazil_1/

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The Biosafety Regulation was approved in March 2005.  This regulation would allow Brazilian scientists the ability to conduct research on embryonic stem cells that were created by in vitro fertilization and had been frozen for three years. (These cells were due to be destroyed.)  However, in 2005 the Attorney General at that time, Carlos Fonteles filed a petition stating that the legislation was unconstitutional and violated right to life. 

On May 29th the Brazilian Supreme Court took hours to discuss and argue the differing views about this topic.  However, by a slim margin (6 Ayes, 5 Nays), the resolution passed!  This now makes the way clear legally for Brazilian scientists to aggressively begin research! 

The Health Minister, Mr. José Gomes Temporão said, ““The decision in the Supreme Court exhibited a significant divergence on the issue, showing that there are ministers who have ethical positions similar to the CNBB. That is, it is not about religious matters, but about promotion and defense of human life,” says a statement distributed by the CNBB. “

Now, I anxiously await our leaders in Washington, D.C. to show courage and backbone and follow the lead of their Brazilian counterparts.  Yes, life is priceless…..isn’t mine as valuable as a frozen embryo?