Newsroom Agência Brasil

Brasilia – The Brazilian Supreme Court decided to postpone a ruling on a lawsuit brought by the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) against the 1979 Amnesty Law. A session was scheduled for today (April 14) but the Chief Justice decided that the issue was sufficiently complex and important to require an examination by the whole court (only eight justices would be present for today’s session – there are eleven Supreme Court justices).
The OAB lawsuit claims that the Amnesty Law infringes on a fundamental precept (“Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental”) when, in its first article, the law refers to crimes “of any nature”.
The OAB position is that ordinary crimes, such as rape, bodily harm and other forms of sexual assault cannot be considered political crimes. In its suit, the OAB points out that there is a difference between “political crimes committed by people who opposed the military regime and ordinary crimes committed against them by agents of repression as ordered by government officials.”
This is a question that goes to the very heart (fundamental percept) of amnesty in Brazil. For the simple reason that the translation of “rape, bodily harm and other forms of sexual assault” is torture.

Allen Bennett – translato/editor The News in English