Speech during the 2010 Global Impunity Summit, April 21, 2010, New York, NY

The perception of justice in Brazil is the same as in other countries – that it is slow, vulnerable to corruption and that poor people end up more rapidly in jail than rich people.

In the last 15 years Brazil has continued to be the country with most murders of journalists, with 25, after Mexico and Colombia.

However, the trend is notably on the decrease – in the last five years with only three murders, less than in Mexico, Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala.

Brazil is the country with the greatest number of prosecutions of crimes. It has more convictions and acquittals than Colombia, even though it has three times less murder cases.

Nevertheless, as in other countries the problem of the justice system is to catch the real instigators or masterminds.

It is clear that there is more justice being done. But one might well ask, Is this the reason that there are fewer crimes against journalists?

Since 2007, when we noticed an unusual amount of legal proceedings in Brazil, we asked ourselves that very question and we found some data that could indicate that trend to us, in addition to a kind of survey among the country’s leading judges and public prosecutors that we held through our Rapid Response Unit. (See full text, http://www.impunidad.com/index.php?notas=24&idioma=us)