At a meeting with the United Nations’s special rapporteur, Leandro Despouy, Brazil’s president of the Federal Appeals Court (STJ), Minister Edson Vidigal, called for making human rights violations a federal crime.
According to Vidigal, Brazil faces over a hundred accusations in the Inter-American Human Rights Court, but all these cases come under state jurisdiction.
During the meeting, Despouy wanted to know what the country has been doing to fight organized crime and stressed the need to act together with other countries, since the problem is an international one.
The president of the STJ pointed out the country’s deficiencies, one of them being the lack of federal judges.
Vidigal said that it would be necessary to double the number of judges to a total of four thousand.
And he availed himself of the opportunity to declare that international assistance is welcome.
“We need to be outfitted effectively to carry on what is called judicial security. And judicial security requires investments that our government budget is unable to provide,” he said.
The Minister said, nevertheless, that the timetable for expanding the federal court system will be moved up.
“We have an agreement with the Executive for the 183 federal courts that were created last year and scheduled to be installed by the end of 2008 all to be moved up to 2005,” Vidigal informed.
Agência Brasil
Translator: David Silberstein
