Mariana Criola Center for Grassroots Legal Aid, Rio de Janeiro

The Center works with legal aid for social movements and human rights advocacy along three main lines: the fight against criminalization of poverty and social movements; access to land and the protection of quilombo territory; and urban housing.

The activities include legal aid for the street vendors’ movement; intervention in cases involving the prosecution of street vendors arrested by the municipal police on charges of counterfeiting/piracy; mediation in rural and urban conflicts resulting from the struggle for access to land and housing; monitoring of civil and criminal court cases against groups of organized rural and urban workers; filing complaints against violations of these groups’ rights through public agencies like the Offices of the State and Federal Public Prosecutors and various Human Rights Commissions; and debates on Human Rights and Democratization of the Judiciary.

The Project

The project Access to Justice: a path to fight institutional violence against informal workers aims to fight the process of institutional violence involving repeated arrests of workers that survive through informal work, given the high unemployment rates in Brazil.

Repression against informal work by the city government of Rio de Janeiro has increased particularly since the mid-1990s, in the form of arrests of street vendors “in the act” of counterfeiting and piracy.

The arrests demonstrate the government’s position of criminalizing poverty, documented by reports of physical violence by members of the municipal police force, aggravating the situation of street vendors, who are mostly young and have limited schooling and no access to formal jobs.

The court system has reinforced this criminalization process, since the acts themselves pose no danger to society and largely involve limited damages, and could be classified as misdemeanors, thus allowing suspended sentences or other alternative sentences.

The Center seeks to reverse this process of arrest and incarceration of street vendors by promoting a new interpretation by the courts and the city government, capable of guaranteeing the citizens’ rights established by the 1988 National Constitution.

The Center will thus monitor these arrests by the Special Anti-Piracy Law Enforcement Agency and their prosecution by the courts, and when necessary will file pleas for release on own cognizance and habeas corpus, while organizing and supporting class action against this repressive policy.