{"id":6103,"date":"2017-05-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.conectas.org.inf.br\/wp\/noticias\/smoke-screen\/"},"modified":"2021-04-12T18:43:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T18:43:14","slug":"smoke-screen","status":"publish","type":"noticia","link":"https:\/\/conectas.org\/en\/noticias\/smoke-screen\/","title":"Smoke screen","content":"

\"\"Brazil responds to Inter-American Court of Human Rights with outdated data on the prison system<\/p>\n

Brazil has claimed that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a body of the OAS (Organization of American States), violated international law and overstepped its authority by summoning the country to explain the situation in its prisons. The claim was made at a public hearing held this Friday, May 19, at the institution\u2019s headquarters in San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica.<\/p>\n

In the statement by the Brazilian delegation, the Court \u201coverstepped the limits of its conventional mandate\u201d by issuing a resolution with \u201cgeneric accusations\u201d. The resolution<\/u><\/a> in question is an unprecedented ruling given in February this year in which the judges combined four cases of violations in Brazilian prisons into a \u201csupercase\u201d in order to verify the situation in the Brazilian prison system as a whole.<\/p>\n

During the hearing, however, Brazil presented outdated and understated data, as well as generic and insufficient information, to refute the suspicions of the Court that there are \u201csigns of a generalized nationwide structural problem with the prison system\u201d. The most recent statistics cited by the representatives of Brazil in the hearing were from Infopen (National Prison Information Survey), referring to December 2014. Conectas used the Freedom of Information Law to request the publication of more recent data, but the request was denied. Experts believe that the number of prisoners in Brazil now exceeds 700,000, more than the figure of 622,000 claimed by the Ministry of Justice.<\/p>\n

Some of the figures informed during the hearing were understated: according to the Brazilian State there were 37 killings throughout the entire prison system in 2013, a year marked by a series of violent uprisings in the Pedrinhas prison complex, in the northeastern state of Maranh\u00e3o. However, data from the Ministry of Justice and the Maranh\u00e3o State Prison Administration Department reveal that at least 78 people were killed that year at the Pedrinhas complex alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe statement by Brazil was notable for its cynical tone. The authorities said that human rights violations had been remedied in the prisons, and went so far as to demand that the measures issued by the Court be revoked,\u201d said Guilherme Pontes, a lawyer at the NGO Justi\u00e7a Global.<\/p>\n

According to Henrique Apolin\u00e1rio, a lawyer for the Justice program at Conectas Human Rights, the \u201cdata and information collected by the petitioning organizations during recent prison inspections demonstrate that the situation is still very serious and that the violations are systematic. Whatever minor improvements have been made are isolated and do not come close to resolving the structural problems of the prison and youth detention system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Inter-American Court Judge Eugenio Ra\u00fal Zaffaroni drew attention to the report submitted by Brazil, which makes it clear that \u201cthe Brazilian Supreme Court itself has recognized this situation [the widespread crisis in the prison system]\u201d. He also described the country\u2019s policy of mass incarceration as a \u201cmachine issuing prison warrants\u201d and pointed out that adding the roughly 700,000 current prisoners to the 600,000 existing prison warrants, there would be 1.3 million prisoners in Brazil.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne in every hundred Brazilians is involved in a criminal case. Something strange is going on. This is not normal. I want to draw attention to this. They are putting the criminal system, the criminal process, at the center of Brazil\u2019s institutionality. It\u2019s not right,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n

Watch the video of the hearing<\/strong><\/p>\n