Brazil has the second least impartial criminal justice system worldwide

In early 2022, the World Justice Project (WJP) published its annual Rule of Law Index, which ranks 139 countries and jurisdictions in eight categories: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice.   

In this latest edition Brazil dropped three positions compared to the previous  report - which was published before the Covid-19 outbreak - and currently holds 77th place  in the overall global ranking. The deterioration in rule of law, however, was observed on a global scale and, for the fourth consecutive year of the study, more countries have declined than improved in terms of overall performance. In 2021, this amounted to 74.2% of the surveyed countries or around 84.7% of the world’s population, affecting approximately 6.5 billion people.  

Brazil’s position regarding its criminal justice system came as a shock to its legal market, as the country was listed 112th in the table, behind countries like Pakistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone, which rank well behind Brazil, for example, in terms of Human Development Index.  

The report found that Brazil has one of the least impartial criminal justice systems in the world, holding 138th place in the ranking, only ahead of Venezuela, which has notoriously been undergoing a major social, political and economic crisis for years. Brazil also ranks below the global average in the following categories: effectiveness of criminal investigations; timeliness and effectiveness of its adjudications system; effectiveness of the correctional system in reducing criminal behavior; corruption of the criminal system and due process of the law; and rights of the accused.  

"The Brazilian criminal justice has several problems, but the main issue is its segregationist decisions. Of the 600,000 prisoners in Brazil, the vast majority are poor and black individuals. The analysis of specific cases reveals that in white-collar crimes and in crimes committed by low-income individuals, the treatment by police forces and judicial decisions themselves are different. Legal rights do not seem to exist for certain groups of the population, which leads to these sad figures discrediting the Brazilian justice system", stated Pierpaolo Bottini, partner of leading criminal law firm Bottini & Tamasauskas Advogados, to Leaders League - Brasil. 

Click here to read the full WJP Rule of Law Index 2021.