{"id":4465,"date":"2014-12-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.conectas.org.inf.br\/wp\/noticias\/judicial-independence-under-threat\/"},"modified":"2018-01-23T19:30:42","modified_gmt":"2018-01-23T19:30:42","slug":"judicial-independence-under-threat","status":"publish","type":"noticia","link":"https:\/\/conectas.org\/en\/noticias\/judicial-independence-under-threat\/","title":"Judicial independence under threat","content":"

Prison sentence enforcement judges, who are responsible for monitoring prisons and the sentences of prisoners, usually spend less time than they should with the people under their protection and rarely visit prisons. But what was already inadequate got even worse with S\u00e3o Paulo Law 1,208\/2013<\/u><\/a>, which centralizes their activities into just 10 points across the state, further increasing the distance between judges and the judged.<\/p>\n

In an attempt to correct this situation, the ADI (Direct Action of Unconstitutionality<\/u><\/a>) pending in the Supreme Court that challenges the law giving superpowers to the S\u00e3o Paulo State Court has been reinforced with an amicus curiae<\/u><\/a> by Conectas and Pastoral Carcer\u00e1ria, the Catholic Church\u2019s prisoner outreach service. The document, submitted on Thursday (December 18), provides the Supreme Court justices with an independent technical opinion on the subject which, in this case, supports the thesis forwarded by the Attorney General\u2019s Office that the law approved by the S\u00e3o Paulo Legislature at the end of 2013 violates constitutional principles.<\/p>\n

In practice, Law 1,208\/2013 does away with the state\u2019s Prison Sentence Enforcement Courts and replaces them with centralized departments for these judges. The organizations claim that these departments will distance the judges even further from the situation in the state\u2019s prisons and from the prisoners themselves, in violation of the Prison Sentence Enforcement Law that provides for the control of the prison system by the justice system.<\/p>\n