Angola :: Not a day longer
Detention of activists should be addressed during visit by Angolan minister to Brazil
Brazil must break its silence and condemn the arbitrary detention of 17 Angolan activists, said Conectas in a letter sent today, November 12, to the Minister of Foreign Relations Mauro Vieira. The minister will receive, today and tomorrow, his Angolan counterpart Georges Chikoti. The group has been detained for 145 days, accused of threatening the order and security of the State.
“Given this situation and considering the ties that have historically united Angola and Brazil, we request once again that the Brazilian government use its strategic relationship with Angola to intervene positively to guarantee justice for the 17 detained activists,” reads the letter sent by the organization.
Click here to read the letter in full.
On the only occasion that it has commented on the case, the Brazilian government said it will wait until the Universal Periodic Review of Angola in the UN Human Rights Council, scheduled for 2018, to comment on the situation.
The Universal Periodic Review is a UN mechanism to assess, every four and a half years, the respect for human rights in the organization’s 193 member states. The review is conducted by peers, meaning that all countries can issue recommendations. The last time Angola was reviewed was in 2014.
As far as Conectas is concerned, Brazil cannot wait three years to act. “We hope this position will be reconsidered given the seriousness and urgency of the case, since the activists have already been detained for nearly five months,” reads the document sent to Vieira.
The group was arrested in June during a meeting held to read and discuss a book. One of the detainees, Manuel Chivonde Baptista Nito Alves, was in Brazil just weeks earlier, in May, to take part in the 14th International Human Rights Colloquium, organized by Conectas.
