ISER and CEJIL publication analyzes non-compliance with Inter-American Court decisions and criticizes patterns of police violence.
On the 31st anniversary of the second massacre in the Nova Brasília favela, May 8th, the Institute for Religious Studies (ISER) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) are launching the Executive Summary of the Nova Brasília Favela Case, which analyzes the non-compliance with an international ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which condemned the Brazilian State to a series of reparation and non-repetition measures in 2017. The publication will be launched at the Auditorium of the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, at 9:30 am.
More than a summary of the non-compliance with the international decision, the Summary is a collective manifesto, criticizing and denouncing the deliberate conduct of public security policy in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which oscillates between overt violence against black and poor peripheries and the abandonment of these same territories and people.
The document denounces not only a government policy, “But the way the Brazilian State functions, which determines patterns of racial and sexual violence since its foundation and which take on specific contours in the democratic context, remaining in force even after Brazil's international condemnation. This does not mean that the issues analyzed from the supervision of compliance with the determinations of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are not part of government policies. What is emphasized is the continuity of official and unofficial practices that produce contexts of systematic violence, of various kinds, for a large part of the population.”, a section of the report points out.
ISER and CEJIL represent the victims, survivors, and families of the Favela Nova Brasília Case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In pursuit of justice and reparations, the organizations are working to ensure compliance with the rulings, including specific reparation measures such as holding state agents accountable for the massacres and sexual torture, providing individual reparations, offering psychosocial support, and advocating for public policies to reduce police lethality and promote social rights in favela territories.
Understand the case
The Nova Brasília Favela Massacre, in the Complexo do Alemão, refers to two lethal operations carried out by agents of the Rio de Janeiro State police, which occurred on October 18, 1994, and May 8, 1995.
In a police operation carried out in October 1994, state security agents executed 13 people, including teenagers, mostly black. This police raid was also marked by state-sanctioned sexual torture: three young people, two of them teenagers, were victims of acts of sexual violence by police officers, recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as acts of torture. In the 1995 police operation, state agents killed another 13 people.
In its sentencing ruling, the Inter-American Court states that the two massacres are part of the structural context of police violence in Rio de Janeiro, highlighting that police lethality is distributed in a brutally unequal manner in terms of race and class, predominantly affecting young, black people. , poor and unarmed. This context is driven by the complicity of various State bodies, which legitimize a violent and racist public security policy. Despite the abundance of information on the two massacres and episodes of State sexual violence, internal investigation actions were not able to present effective responses for the identification and accountability of State agents, as well as adequate reparation measures for family members and victims of state violence.
More than three decades after the events, the Brazilian State continues to fail to comply with almost all of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights' rulings. This situation allows us to take the Favela Nova Brasília case as a paradigm from which to debate the current democratic project in the country. It is not just a matter of revisiting the violations committed by the State and the legal outlines of state responsibility determined by the Court, but of understanding them as a structuring part of the Brazilian democratic order.
The Executive Summary of the Favela Nova Brasília Case is part of ISER's publications, which aim to contribute to the strengthening of social movements and collective articulations capable of impacting the field of the justice system, as well as establishing itself as an instrument in the struggle for memory.