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Brazil In the Dark Hidden Abuses Against Detained Youths in Rio de Janeiro When Human Rights Watch last visited Rio de Janeiro’s five juvenile detention centers, in July and August 2003, we found a system that was decaying, filthy, and dangerously overcrowded. The facilities we saw did not meet basic standards of health or hygiene. Complaints of beatings and other ill-treatment were routinely ignored by the state’s Department of Socio-Educational Action (Departamento Geral de Ações Sócio-Educativas, DEGASE), the authority responsible for the state’s juvenile detention centers. The system lacked effective oversight; in particular, administrative sanctions against guards were rare, and none of the officials we spoke with knew of any case in which a guard had received a criminal conviction for abusive conduct. HRW Index No.: B1702 June 9, 2005 Also available in 
Download PDF, 51 KB, 392 pgs Purchase online Printer friendly version “Real Dungeons” Juvenile Detention in the State of Rio de Janeiro The 70-page report documents that youths in Rio de Janeiro’s detention centers are often beaten and verbally abused by guards. Most complaints of ill-treatment are never investigated by the state’s Department of Socio-Economic Action (Departamento Geral de Ações Sócio-Educativas, or DEGASE), the authority responsible for juvenile detention facilities. Administrative sanctions against guards are rare and usually take the form of transfers to other detention centers; no guard has ever faced criminal charges for abusive conduct. December 7, 2004 Also available in
Download PDF, 425 KB, 67 pgs Purchase online Cruel Confinement: Abuses Against Detained Children in Northern Brazil, Children in northern Brazil are routinely beaten by police and detained in abusive conditions, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. The release comes on the 100th day of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration. Children face violence at the hands of other youths, are unnecessarily confined to their cells for lengthy periods of time, and often do not receive the schooling to which the Brazilian constitution entitles them, Human Rights Watch said. Brazil is a federation of states, much like the United States, and each state controls its own juvenile detention system. But the federal government has a key role in enforcing the national juvenile justice law. And the federal government can condition its funding of state juvenile detention systems on their compliance with human rights norms. Human Rights Watch's 63-page report, Cruel Confinement: Abuses Against Detained Children in Northern Brazil, is based on interviews with 44 detained youth, as well as dozens of additional interviews with government officials, lawyers, social workers, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations. Human Rights Watch inspected a total of 17 detention facilities, including four girls' detention center, in the states of Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Rondônia, and Pará. Police beatings during and after arrest are common, the report found. Such abuses often occur at police stations, where Brazilian law allows children to be held for up to five days while they await transfer to a juvenile detention facility. In rural areas, where police routinely violate the five-day limit on detention in police lockups, children are at greater risk of police abuse. HRW Index No.: B1501 April 10, 2003 Download PDF Purchase online Brazil: Child Soldier Global Report 2001 From the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers There are indications of under-18s in government armed forces as the minimum age of voluntary recruitment is 17. June 12, 2001 Brazil: Landmine Monitor Report 2000 Brazil signed the Mine Ban Treaty on 3 December 1997 and ratified on 30 April 1999. Brazil's National Congress promulgated it on 5 August 1999 by Decree 3.128. The treaty entered into force for Brazil on 1 October 1999, but it has yet to enact implementation legislation. Brazil has domestic legislation regarding explosives and firearms. August 1, 2000 POLICE BRUTALITY IN URBAN BRAZIL Rapid, unplanned growth of Brazil’s urban centers—11 of its cities are home to more than a million people each—has been accompanied in most cases by soaring crime rates and public dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system. In several states, authorities responded with policies that tolerate or promote grave violations of the rights of criminal suspects. We examine extrajudicial executions, near-fatal shootings, and forced disappearances of civilians, and both the inadequate or constructive responses of political, prosecutorial, and judicial authorities.Focusing on seven of Brazil’s cities, we found that police often kill without justification, frequently file false reports describing extrajudicial executions as shootouts with dangerous criminal elements, and then take the corpses of their victims to emergency rooms so that "first aid" may be administered. By removing bodies from the crime scene (a violation of Brazilian law), they undermine any investigation. In some states, police have continued the abhorrent practice of forced disappearances. When presented with indictments in the few cases that are investigated, Brazilian courts, particularly those in the military justice system, fail to fulfill their legal obligation. Bias against criminal suspects is nearly as pervasive in the courts as on police forces and in society at large. HRW Index No.: 2114 April 1, 1997 Purchase online Fighting Violence with Violence Human Rights Abuse and Criminality in Rio de Janeiro The homicide rate in Rio de Janeiro tripled in the last 15 years and public concern grew apace. The press, prominent civic leaders, and politicians focused particularly on violence related to criminal gangs and drug trafficking. Unfortu-nately, law enforcement efforts to control crime relied on flagrant and numerous human rights abuses. This report documents instances of police brutality, including two massacres in which 27 residents of one of Rio's hillside slums were killed. We also document the human rights violations that accompanied the largest assault to date on Rio's drug gangs, Operation Rio, from November 1994 to mid-1995, which included torture, arbitrary detentions and warrantless searches and at least one unnecessary use of lethal force. HRW Index No.: B802 January 1, 1996 VIOLENCE AGAINST THE MACUXI AND WAPIXANA INDIANS IN RAPOSA SERRA DO SOL AND NORTHERN RORAIMA FROM 1988 TO 1994 While land has always played a central role in the cultures, identities, and religions of indigenous peoples, Indians who attempt to exercise the rights that are guaranteed to them in the Brazilian Constitution are frequently the victims of violent attacks and other human rights abuses. This report emphasizes that international human rights standards require the Brazilian government to protect the cultures of indigenous peoples and ensure that land conflicts be settled peacefully and with due process. HRW Index No.: B607 June 1, 1994 Final Justice Police and Death Squad Homicides of Adolescents in Brazil Despite the considerable attention that has been brought to homicides of adolescents, impunity for those responsible for these abuses has in most respects, continued to prevail. As the cases in Final Justice reveal, this impunity is the product of several factors, but one primary cause is the lack of political will to adequately investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against children and adolescents. When the will to prosecute does exist, investigations and convictions are possible. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and even individual convictions in a handful of high-profile cases may have little impact on the larger problem and on the structures of violence that fuel abuses by Brazil's police force and unofficial death squads. The struggle to end the pattern of homicides of adolescents will not be fast or easy. A large measure of blame for this violence must be attributed to the poverty, economic and racial inequalities, domestic violence and substance abuse problems that draw poor Brazilian youth onto the streets or into crime. Similarly, complex social forces and the banalization of violence create a situation where vigilante justice is frequently an acceptable method of protecting communities, which are often poorly served by their elected governments, from those who are perceived as criminals and threats to safety. Yet protecting Brazil's children and adolescents—and particularly the most common targets of violence: poor, black or dark-skinned adolescent boys—from violence cannot and should not wait for the solutions to other entrenched social problems, particularly when it is apparent that the police, either on- or off-duty, are responsible for a significant proportion of the killings. HRW Index No.: 1231 February 1, 1994 Forced Labor in Brazil Re-Visited On-Site Investigations Document that Practice Continues What has been documented in our previous reports remains true today: in the inaccessible forests of the central and western states of Brazil, large estate owners use forced labor to cut and burn enormous tracts of land for the purpose of turning the forest into cattle pasture. Though the environmental damage caused by burning Brazil's forests has become well known, less attention is usually paid to the human aspect of this practice: the brutal and illegal forced labor conditions imposed upon thousands of landless rural workers. HRW Index No.: B512 November 1, 1993 Purchase online URBAN POLICE VIOLENCE IN BRAZIL Torture and Police Killings In Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro after Five Years An update of a 1987 Americas Watch report, Urban Police Violence in Brazil describes incidents of torture and extra-judicial killings by police and updates specific cases previously reported. It finds that some authorities in both states have tried to address the problem of the mistreatment of suspects and torture in police precincts, and such incidents have become less common, while the problem of extra-judicial killings by vigilante groups continues. HRW Index No.: B505 May 1, 1993 Defending the Earth Abuses of Human Rights and the Environment This report is the result of an unprecedented joint effort between two leading citizen advocacy organizations: a human rights group, Human Rights Watch; and an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council. As one who has been for 14 years privileged to be involved with both, I have long believed that a cooperative effort such as this one will enhance both causes significantly. Abuses of human rights often exist in tandem with environmental degradation. Suppression of dissent -- often violent -- is frequently employed by governments to silence opposition to harmful political and social policies and development schemes that could not withstand public scrutiny, and to forestall public concern about environmental decay. The case studies in this report demonstrate a linkage between human rights and environmental abuses that is global in scope, occurring in both industrialized and developing countries. Issuing this joint report at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro will focus attention on the relationship, often causal, between human rights and environmental abuses. We also hope that it marks the start of future exchanges between the two groups of advocates, so that both causes will benefit from an expanded constituency for their concerns. June 1, 1992 Download PDF, 570 KB, 144 pgs Printer friendly version The Struggle for Land in Brazil Rural Violence Continues This report focuses on the chronic problem of impunity in Brazil in the context of the struggle over land use and agrarian reform. It highlights four states and concludes that impunity—or government failure to enforce criminal laws, permitting and encouraging further criminal behavior in the context of the struggle for land—exists in these regions and throughout Brazil. In light of the June 1992 United Nations conference on the environment in Rio de Janeiro, Americas Watch hopes to emphasize the relation between the degradation of the environment and the parallel degradation of human rights. The marginalized subsistence farmers confront the same enemy that faces the environmentalists: the large landowners who want no government interference in their use of land, certainly do not want to have portions of their enormous domains confiscated for agrarian reform, and are in part responsible for many of the human rights abuses currently taking place. HRW Index No.: 0707 May 1, 1992 Criminal Injustice Violence Against Women in Brazil The Brazilian government is failing to prosecute violence against women in the home fully and fairly. Despite ever-increasing domestic violence (particularly wife-murder, battery and rap) impunity and discriminatory treatment in favor of the perpetrators of domestic violence are still the rule in the Brazilian justice system. Over 70 percent of all reported cases of violence against women take place in the home. Of these reported cases, a statistically insignificant number never result in punishment of the accused. In this report, the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch and Americas Watch make a series of recommendations designed to promote equal protection of the law in Brazil without regard to gender. HRW Index No.: 0480 October 1, 1991
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