Up against the wall

At a hearing this Friday, Brazil will respond to the Inter-American Court on violations in the prison and youth detention systems

Brazil will have to provide explanations this Friday, May 19, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a body of the OAS (Organization of American States), on the situation in its prisons.

The country will testify, with a live broadcast, at the headquarters of the institution in Costa Rica, at 2.30 pm (Brasília time). The public hearing was convened after the Court concluded, based on the analysis of four separate cases, that these situations are not isolated and that the crisis in the Brazilian prison system is structural.

“The geographic distance between the prison facilities whose conditions are the subject of provisional measures and their affiliation to different regions of the country indicates that this is a more widespread phenomenon than the four cases referred to this Court,” reads an excerpt from its decision.

The facilities it mentions are the prison complexes of Curado, in the state of Pernambuco, and of Pedrinhas, in the state of Maranhão; the Plácido de Sá Carvalho Penal Institute, in the state of Rio de Janeiro; and the UNIS Youth Detention Center, in the state of Espírito Santo.

The Brazilian government will be represented by a delegation of 15 people. The event will also be attended by members of the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) – the body that accepted the four complaints and subsequently referred them to the Court – and representatives of the petitioning organizations, namely Conectas, Justiça Global, the Rio de Janeiro State Public Defender’s Office and the Serra Municipal Centre for the Defense of Human Rights.

A resolution issued in February this year combines these four cases of violations into a “supercase” in order to verify the overall situation. The Court took a similar step against Venezuela in 2011 and 2015, when it decided to combine complaints of violations at the country’s detention centers.

The resolution requested answers from the Brazilian government to 52 questions on the country’s prison system, emphasizing specific data from the monitored facilities, and recommended concrete measures in 11 areas to prevent human rights violations in the prisons. It also informed about the visit of the Court’s judges to the country on a date yet to be determined.