
Interview with Nina Barrouin: Brazilian Anti-torture Lawyer and Innovative Award Winner
Nina Barrouin of the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) and the Institute of Religious Studies (ISER), winner of one of REDRESS’s Innovative Lawyers Awards, sat down with us to talk about the state of the anti-torture movement in Brazil.
Nina has been connected to the anti-torture field since her Bachelor of Law. She is currently studying for a MA degree in law and is a member of the Rio de Janeiro State Front for Decarceration. She is also part of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro’s student research group on the Inter-American Human Rights System and a fellow researcher at the Institute of Applied Economic Research where she investigates the impacts of mass incarceration.
Why did you become a human rights lawyer?
The Brazilian context is defined by structural violations of human rights. When I started my studies in law with a mix of hope and disbelief in the justice system, I realised that the law systematically operates as a fundamental tool for legitimising and perpetrating violence.
Both in the classroom and with some professors and in collective construction with social movements other perspectives of law were presented to me. Those references presented me with ways of thinking about justice beyond state justice. In this sense, human rights law would be a possible way of mobilising the law in an insurgent way.
What does it mean to be a human rights lawyer in your country, what kinds of pressures have you faced, and how have you addressed them?
I believe that being a human rights lawyer in Brazil means not relying on the justice system to promote justice, but trying to use it strategically based on mobilisations built in conjunction with universities, social movements, and civil society in general. Thinking about human rights law in Brazil necessarily means thinking about the law from a racially informed perspective in conjunction with gender, class, sexuality, territory and religion, among other markers. Therefore, it means confronting the violence that these structures reproduce in the justice system and understanding the challenge posed by the fact that the institutions that are supposed to guarantee rights are the ones that very often violate them.
State. As a result of the legacy of slavery that still affects the present, combined with a military dictatorship with an unfinished transition, state institutions operate as a rule from a racist, classist, and patriarchal logic with really militarised influences.
In this context, the institutions of the justice system and other fundamental instruments for access to justice, such as these programmes to protect human rights defenders at risk or witnesses threatened with that, are fragile and insufficient. This has a profound impact on the field of human rights law and also generates pressure while conducting cases.
In addition, waves of huge right-wing hatred are frequently directed against civil society organisations, spreading fake news, and misrepresenting the work produced by these organisations. The criminalisation of social movements in civil society continues to be a reality in Brazil, requiring future work together to strengthen and protect activists.
Brazil has a terrifying scenario of violence against human rights defenders, and just like all the other forms of violence that are perpetrated here, the level of risk that people are exposed to is informed by racial dimensions, implicated with gender, class, and territory, among other social markers. The risk and pressure are also unevenly distributed. It is essential that organisations, foundations, and collectives understand and support more those who find themselves on the front line and at a greater risk and have often less support.
Who are the principal perpetrators of torture in Brazil and what are the main contexts in which torture occurs?
The State is the main perpetrator of torture in Brazil. Since slavery, torture has been used against Black and Indigenous populations in Brazil, and through various historical periods, has remained present in the official and unofficial dynamics of the Brazilian State. This is evident, for example, when you look at the Brazilian prison system, where more than 800,000 people are subjected to inhumane conditions, which implies a structural context of torture, with the denial of drinking water, adequate food, access to health, hygiene, outdoor access, and many other rights prescribed in international law. This is a context of systematic rights violations and generalised torture. Another example of torture is the one carried out by security forces against Black youth living in favelas and Brazilian prisons during police operations. There are countless national and international reports on this issue.
In this context, it’s very important to highlight sexual torture carried out by State agents against women and LGBTQ+ people. An emblematic case of the struggle for justice and reparations against sexual torture and police lethality is the Favela Nova Brasília case, in which the victims and their families, with the support of civil society organisations CEJIL (Center for Justice and International Law) and ISER (Institute for Religious Studies) where I’ve been working for the past years, successfully brought a case before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights which condemns the Brazilian State.
The central issue of the case is the lack of adequate response to the sexual torture and massacres carried out by Rio de Janeiro state police officers in Favela Nova Brasília in 1994-1995. In this police operation, carried out in October 1994, state security agents executed 13 people, including teenagers, most of whom were Black. This police operation was also marked by sexual torture. Three young women, two of them teenagers, were victims of acts of sexual violence by police officers, and that was recognised by the Interamerican Human Rights Court as acts of torture.
In 1995 another police operation happened, and State agents killed 13 people. In the sentence, the Inter-AmericanCourt states that the two massacres are part of the structural context of police violence in Rio de Janeiro, highlighting that police lethality is brutally, unequally distributed in terms of race and class, predominantly affecting youth, Black, poor, and unarmed people.
This context is driven by the combination of various State bodies which legitimised violent and racist public security policy. In the last years, we worked towards the compliance of the sentence, but the State has failed to comply with the sentence in a minimally adequate manner. Faced with this, the families, victims, ISER, CEJIL, and other organisations and movements in the country continue to fight for memory, justice, and reparation. We advocate for the implementation of the sentence, such as holding the State agents responsible for the massacres and sexual torture effectively accountable, as well as the implementation of a plan to reduce police lethality and violence. I think it’s important to highlight that the vast majority of cases of sexual torture in Brazilian cities still lack official recognition.
There’s an issue with underreporting?
Yes. It’s underreported because when a person goes to report this sort of violence in a police station, the corporatism that is very deeply rooted in the police makes it not a safe space to report this sort of violence, and the stigma of sexual violence and sexual torture is very strong It’s very hard to denounce because in Brazil those who investigate police human rights violations are the police, A as we can see in this case, after a complaint is presented in a police station, the other institutions of the criminal justice system will act in the same corporatist way to protect the police officers. It’s a chain of legitimisation of violence that goes from the police through the judiciary.
Could you describe a particular initiative you’ve worked on in Brazil that has contributed to advancing the global movement against torture, and can you tell us a bit about the tools or strategies you used while working on that?
There are two initiatives I’ve been involved in which are connected to the challenges facing the fight against torture, especially sexual torture. For over three years I was a member of the State Committee on Torture Prevention, a collegiate body that is part of the Torture Prevention Policy and that brings together government and civil society representatives. The Committee and the entire prevention policy are a result of the operational protocol of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment. Brazil is signatory of this instrument, and the country is obliged to create autonomous and effective monitoring methods.
An example of our networked approach to this work came after reports that young women detained in juvenile detention centres were suffering from sexual violence by detention centre officers.
Through interinstitutional efforts, we led an articulation in favour of the approval of legislation that guarantees that only female agents can work in female detention centres, which was finally approved. This whole process was mobilised by the Committee, together with the Mechanism, with a lot of involvement from the movements of relatives of people deprived of their liberty who are part of the prevention policy.
In the same direction, to address and confront sexual torture perpetrated by agents of the State in places of deprivation of liberty, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro’s Student Research Group on the Interamerican Human Rights System, of which I am a member of the coordination team, sent an amicus curiae brief to the Inter-American Court of human rights on a collegiate case in which one of the woman victims of the dictatorship Denise Peres Crispim suffered torture while pregnant at as well at the time of her delivery.
In the document, we analyse this specific context of violence perpetrated by the Brazilian State against mothers, and pregnant women deprived of their liberty in the dictatorial context. In the amicus curiae brief, we also characterised this sort of State violence as a gendered, reproductive, and obstetric violence to make it possible to recognise and redress the specificities of the torture perpetrated against mothers and pregnant women during the dictatorship. We demonstrated the connections between the violations in the case and the torture experienced by non-White pregnant women deprived of their liberty today. The normalisation of the violence against women deprived of their liberty demands that we adopt a racialised gender lens in Brazil, capable of recognising and repairing the daily violence directed against women deprived of their liberty. We believe that this case is a very important opportunity for the Court to incorporate a gender lens constructed in a complex, inclusive, and intersectional way in an analysis of serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the dictatorship and reconfigure it in our democracy.
How do you see the work of human rights lawyers who work on anti-torture, such as yourself, developing in Brazil in the near future, and what do you think are the next steps in challenging torture?
I believe that human rights law is at an important moment of discussion and reconfiguration. There are many challenges in the anti-torture field, especially those related to strengthening the policy to prevent and combat torture. The implementation of new mechanisms and committees and other stages of review need to take place in a way that respects international parameters, guaranteeing the presence of people directly affected by State violence and expressly prohibiting the participation of agents of the security forces.
Maintaining the policy and developing it along these lines is a challenge for the coming years. In addition, the fight against torture is absolutely linked to the police, to decarcerate and defund the police. Increasing the State penal structure, as we see it happen in Brazil, is counter to the fight against torture, and this agenda is a major challenge. I believe young lawyers working in this field share this challenge of joining forces in this struggle and thinking about ways to mobilise law in an insurgent way, connecting our strategies locally and internationally.
This is a very difficult field to work in. What motivates you to keep going?
There are many difficulties but the network that acts collectively in this field is very inspiring, and this renews our energy and motivates us even in the most adverse scenarios. Without a doubt, being a part of groups like the Rio de Janeiro State Front for Decarceration and the National Agenda for Decarceration inspires me very deeply. I think one of the moments that I’m most proud of was building the Warriors for Decarceration training cycles as the coordinator of the programme of rights and justice at ISER. The initiative seeks to build a political, pedagogic project based on the methodology of popular legal education. It takes the form of legal political training cycles with family members of people deprived of liberty based on partnerships with social movements fighting against mass incarceration and other forms of State violence. In partnership with two social movements, AMUGUE and AMAR, we carry out three training cycles to support and strengthen the collective struggle of these political organisations. A total of 65 people took part in these training sessions, and I am deeply inspired by the nature of joint mobilisation that was formed through this process.
The amicus curiae that you made to the Inter-American Court was related to events that took place during the dictatorship. Could you give us some more context about that for people who aren’t aware of that time?
We had a very long dictatorship in Brazil that lasted 21 years. During this period the structural human rights violations that were present in Brazilian history since the colonisation process, were rearticulated in this authoritarian dictatorship period. A large part of the population as victimised during this period. The police, for example, continues to act in a very racist and classist way. We had groups of extermination that in the peripheries of Brazil killed teenagers indiscriminately.
Different political organisations that were fighting against the dictatorship were also repressed, and the repression was something that marked profoundly our society and created different sorts of punishments and tortures. Lots of Brazilians were in exile, others were executed or imprisoned. Our dictatorship had a very soft end, so the transition to democracy didn’t really create accountability for the perpetration of human rights violations that happened during the dictatorship. We have this inheritance of our dictatorship that combined with our slavery past that creates a very authoritarian culture and a very militarised culture in Brazil nowadays.
Of course, we try to create mechanisms with a lot of pressure on civil society organisations and movements to confront this scenario and to create opportunities for accountability for what happened during this period, but we still remain without justice being made.
The amicus curiae in the Denise Peres Crispim case seeks to articulate arguments that demonstrate that this violence perpetrated against Denise is part of a context of human rights violations directed against women deprived of their liberty during the dictatorship, and that is still something that has repercussions in the present because we see how the prison system treats and creates generalised contexts of torture to non-White women that are incarcerated today. That has a total connection both with our dictatorship and the process of transition to democracy, as well as with our slavery past. The amicus curiae brief organised a bit of these arguments, demonstrating these connections, in order to offer the Interamerican Court of Human Rights possibilities of mobilising a racialised gender lens to analyse our scenarios of human rights violations during the dictatorship, but creating possibilities of redress, with repercussions in the present as well.
Is that one of the proudest achievements of your career or is there another moment you’re particularly proud of?
I think the Warriors for Decarceration is something that is very important for me because seeing our network expanding is something that inspires me deeply to continue and to learn more and find other ways to think about the law and be a lawyer.
About the Awards
REDRESS’s Innovative Lawyers Awards, funded with the support of the United Against Torture Consortium, aim to to recognise the vital work of new and emerging anti-torture champions, expose them to a broader peer support network, offer them some financial support to pursue public interest litigation, and to inspire other lawyers and practitioners.
The United Against Torture Consortium (UATC) brings together six of the world’s leading anti-torture organisations with the aim of strengthening and expanding the anti-torture movement by pooling their expertise in torture prevention, protection, survivor rehabilitation, and strategic litigation against torture.
The UATC harnesses the strengths of REDRESS, the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT), the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), the International Federation of Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture (FIACAT), the Omega Research Foundation, and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT).
Funded by the European Union, the Consortium works in partnership with over 200 civil society organisations and other partners in over 100 countries.