Lula resumes protection for human rights activists – 04/22/2023 – Politics

The Ministry of Human Rights will resume actions to protect human rights defenders dismantled during the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government, says Nilmário Miranda, special advisor for the Defense of Democracy, Memory and Truth.

“The setback began in the Temer government, but it collapsed with Bolsonaro”, he says.

Nilmário was Minister of Human Rights during the first Lula (PT) government and helped create the Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders. He claims that during the previous management the agency’s actions were disjointed and there was a lack of budget.

“The State was silent and did not fulfill its obligations. When I say the Brazilian State, I am talking about a specific government.”

In March, the ministry held a meeting with civil society representatives to present actions that the ministry intends to take on in the coming years.

On the occasion, measures of reparation that the Brazilian State must comply with after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held the country responsible for the violation of the rights of Gabriel Sales Pimenta were also discussed.

In 1982, aged 27, he was murdered because of his work in defense of human rights. Sales Pimenta was a lawyer for the Union of Rural Workers in Marabá, Pará, and defended lawsuits against landowners.

It was more than 20 years before the Brazilian courts without a response until the statute of limitations. The case then reached the Inter-American Court after a complaint made by Cejil (Center for Justice and International Law) in partnership with the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) in 2006.

The court handed down the verdict in October last year. From then on, the country has one year to fulfill a series of initiatives, which will be monitored by the international body.

In the document, the court ordered Brazil to adopt specific measures for the case, but also the need to create mechanisms to prevent crimes against human rights defenders, in addition to protocols to act in cases of violence.

“We agree with the content of the sentence and the recommendations. We are willing to comply not only because the court decided and we accept the jurisdiction, but we think that these actions can contribute to the advancement of Brazil”, says Nilmário.

Among the actions that the ministry intends to implement is the creation of a working group with members of the government, civil society and the public sphere, such as the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office.

Nilmário cites CPT and Contag (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers) as examples of civil society organizations.

There are also demands linked to the case, such as the payment of compensation to the family, a public act of recognition by international society and the creation of memory centers. “The ministry is already studying this, what to do, where to do it”, he says.

For José Batista Gonçalves Afonso, member of the national coordination of the CPT, who was present at the meeting with the ministry, the sentence has an important political and symbolic weight, since the decision imposes a series of obligations on the federal government, such as the adoption of public tackling impunity in cases of human rights violations.

According to Afonso, there was a political decision by the Bolsonaro government to disregard the recommendations of the Inter-American Court.

“We didn’t have open doors to discuss these issues related to human rights policies”, he says. But, now, the CPT evaluates the ministry’s positioning with an important step, which needs to be monitored.

In addition to the Sales Pimenta case, the portfolio intends to adapt existing mechanisms to include communicators and environmentalists in actions to protect human rights defenders. “This is new and it’s good. It’s the case of the crime against Dom Phillips and Bruno [Pereira]which came to light”, says Nilmário.

The government also wants to create a mechanism that allows the reopening of judicial proceedings. According to the advisor, in the Brazilian countryside alone there are around 900 crimes against human rights defenders that have not been resolved in court.

“There is total impunity, including statute of limitations, because these peasants and defenders have no means of following up on the sentence and putting pressure on the judiciary.”

According to Nilmário, this is the ministry’s priority. For the task to be accomplished, there must be consensus between the STF (Federal Supreme Court), STJ (Superior Court of Justice) and CNJ (National Council of Justice).

In addition to these actions, the ministry also decided to reappoint former members of the Special Commission for the Dead and Disappeared, extinguished by the Bolsonaro government in 2022. Sheet revealed.

The Ministry of Human Rights also recomposed the Amnesty Commission of the Military Dictatorship, which the former president’s government had paralyzed.

In the first session of the commission, on the eve of the anniversary of the 1964 military coup, the agenda was to review the judgments carried out during the administration of Damares Alves in the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, which had requests for amnesty denied in decisions considered unfair.

The session marked the resumption of the group’s work and was full of criticism of Bolsonarist management —which equipped the group with military personnel and supporters of the dictatorial regime.