President Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) on Tuesday dismissed the 11 members of the National Mechanism for Preventing and Combating Torture (MNPCT), a federal government group that monitors violations of rights and acts to prevent torture in institutions such as penitentiaries.
According to the decree, the group now only consists of unpaid participants.
Recently dismissed, the coordinator of the MNPCT, Daniel Melo, said that this new development will make its work impossible. The president of the National Human Rights Council, Leonardo Pinho, said he would go to the court to fight the measure.
MNPCT is a group created in 2013 that studied and created resources about human rights violations in the country. They reported on the situation in the Anísio Jobim Penitentiary Complex in the Amazon, where dozens of inmates were killed from 2017 to 2019.
According to the ex-coordinator of the group, the group's dismissal a retaliation against its work.
"This is a clear retaliation. The group has been for years, revealing a systematic practice of torture in Brazil," he said.
The decree dismisses the group's paid members but technically exists on paper. According to the order, from now on, unpaid members will make up the group. For Melo, this change is equivalent to the "extinction" of the group.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon