The organization of the Brazilian police, the high death toll in police actions, and the country's prison policy were the chief topics about which Brazil was questioned by the United Nations (UN) High Commission on Human Rights, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Thursday, October 27, Brazil concluded the defense of its second report in compliance with the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights. The Presidential secretary of Human Rights, Mário Mamede, explained how the presentation of the report went.
"The brunt of the questioning by the committee concerned the matter of the organization of the Brazilian police," Mamede said.
Various questions were also raised regarding the number of prison inmates in Brazil. According to the secretary, the UN commission received information from civil society sources about prisoners who had already served their sentences and remained incarcerated.
The Brazilian delegation pledged to respond to the questions that were not answered to the satisfaction of the UN commission by next Tuesday, November 1st. After this follow-up, the UN rapporteurs and experts will prepare a document that will be handed over to the Brazilian government, the legislative and judicial branches, and the Public Defense Ministry.
Brazil ratified the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights in 1992 and submitted its first report to the UN in 1994. The second report was sent to the UN in November, 2004, and contains information on the implementation of political and civil rights in Brazil during the course of an entire decade (1994-2004). Agência Brasil
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.