OMCT and civil society alert UN Committee of torture of children in Brazil detention
The pre-session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on Brazil is taking place this month in Geneva. The OMCT and its partners GAJOP, CEDECA Ceara and the Coalizão pela Socioeducação are presenting an alternative report to raise with the Committee our major concerns about the grave violations of children's rights deprived of liberty.
In Brazil, children in conflict with the law can be sent to socio-educative centers where they are detained for the duration of their sentences. These centers, although in theory part of socio-educative measures, are in reality actual prisons, in which children are subjected to beatings, humiliation, burns, confinement in their cells of 22 to 23 hours per day, lack of hygiene, lack of access to health care and insufficient food, among many other violations.
Currently, Brazil is considering laws that aim at reducing the minimum age of criminal responsibility and at increasing the duration of detention in sentencing applying to children. These trends are very concerning and would only lead to children being more exposed to torture and ill-treatment in detention.
Meanwhile, the anti-torture system continues to be weakened. In the State of Pernambuco, the state preventive mechanism stopped functioning since 2023 because of the dismissal of all its members. This mechanism used to conduct regular inspection visits of units of detention. Without the regular inspection visits that this mechanism was conducting in units of detention, children detained are even more invisible and at risk of torture.