Human Rights Watch 2011 Report – Brazil

More required reading at FIFA HQ

The following are extracts from the Human Rights Watch 2011 World Report that pertain to the 2014 host of the FIFA World Cup, Brazil. The full HRW report on Brazil can be read here.

“Most of Brazil's metropolitan areas are plagued by widespread violence perpetrated by criminal gangs and abusive police. Violence especially impacts low-income communities. There are more than 40,000 intentional homicides in Brazil every year. In Rio de Janeiro hundreds of low-income communities are occupied and controlled by drug gangs, who routinely engage in violent crime and extortion.”

“Police abuse, including extrajudicial execution, is a chronic problem. According to official data, police were responsible for 505 killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone in the first six months of 2010. This amounts to roughly three police killings per day, or at least one police killing for every six ‘regular’ intentional homicides.”

“Brazil's prisons and jails are plagued by inhumane conditions, violence, and severe overcrowding. Delays within the justice system contribute to the overcrowding: some 44 per cent of all inmates in the country are pretrial detainees. Over the past three years the National Council of Justice, the judiciary's oversight body, ordered the release of more than 25,000 prisoners who were being held arbitrarily. The use of torture is a chronic problem within the penitentiary system.”

“Indigenous and landless peoples face threats and violence, particularly in land disputes in rural areas. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, 25 people were killed and 62 were attacked in rural conflicts throughout the country in 2009. In September 2010 José Valmeristo Soares, a member of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement, was killed by gunmen in Para, the state with the highest numbers of such killings.”