MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

No statute of limitations wanted for Brazilian enslavers

Aras insisted there were cases such as racism where a statute of limitations does not apply

Brazil's Attorney General Augusto Aras Monday filed a request before the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to make the crime of “labor analogous to slavery” uneligible for a statute of limitations, which is a constitutional guarantee for defendants, but it is not absolute.

Aras insisted there were cases such as racism where such a constraint does not apply, allowing prosecutions to move on. In his injunction request, Aras asks the STF to ban courts from ruling against prosecuting offenders due to time passed.

Read also: Enslaved Paraguayan workers freed in Rio de Janeiro

“The 'imprescriptibility' now being vindicated advocates as an instrument to rescue the memory and the truth, in the perspective of the right of the victims of the crime of reduction to a condition analogous to that of a slave. The right to memory and truth, especially when it comes to serious human rights violations, is a vector of human dignity,” argued the prosecutor.

Last week, the PGR also defended at the STF the priority of judging actions that deal with the fight against slave labor. The request was sent on Thursday. Aras asked that actions dealing with the matter be judged by the Court in the first half of this year.

The prosecutor argued that 2.5 thousand workers in conditions analogous to slavery were rescued by labor inspectors last year.

Read also: Brazil: 4 Argentine workers rescued from slavery conditions

Earlier this month, the Public Defender of the Union (DPU) also filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court to guarantee the expropriation of land and the confiscation of assets of companies caught using workers in conditions analogous to slavery. In the injunction filed at the Supreme Court, the agency argues that the measure is provided for in Article 243 of the Constitution, but has not yet been regulated.

The action requests the immediate use of Law 8.257 of 1991 to expropriate rural and urban properties that use workers in conditions analogous to slavery. The norm is applied in the expropriation of cases of drug cultivation.