Achievements

• From 2001 to 2010, more than 870 activists and academics from 50 countries, primarily Africa, Asia and Latin America, have participated in the 10 editions of the Colloquium. Many of them remain in contact and develop collaborative activities, with the facilitation of Conectas.  

• In six years, 34 activists from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique have taken part in the Fellowship Program. Once back in their home countries, they apply the knowledge acquired in Brazil to develop projects in various fields of human rights. 

• By the end of 2010, 12 issues of the Sur Journal had been published, containing 95 articles, 70% written by authors from the Global South. In 2011, the partner organization Partners in Development for Research, Consulting and Training (Egypt) published a special edition in Arabic. 

• Conectas has participated in 14 sessions of the UN Human Rights Council and in 2 sessions of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Courses have been organized for more than 500 human rights defenders from 25 countries, with a special focus on the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism and the African human rights system. 

• Conectas, together with partners, has also addressed human rights violations in North Korea, Iran, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe and Venezuela, among other countries. 
• In 2010, Conectas embarked on activities related to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 

• Over the past 7 years, Conectas has filed 65 compensation lawsuits and administrative proceedings in cases involving torture or death in the facilities of Fundação Casa/FEBEM. It has managed to raise compensation levels for death from 30 to 300 times the minimum monthly wage and it also succeeded in obtaining the first pension for a mother of one of the victims. 
• Conectas is responsible for more than 15 other legal cases involving police violence and the prison system – some of them using the UN and regional human rights systems.

• By the end of 2010, Conectas had submitted 41 amici curiae briefs to the Supreme Federal Court, 2 to the São Paulo Court of Appeals and 2 to the Constitutional Court of Colombia, on a range of issues, such as disarmament, same-sex unions and slave labor. 

• Conectas has participated in 4 public hearings held by the Supreme Federal Court on affirmative action measures, pregnancy termination in cases of anencephaly, the environment and recycled tire imports, and the right to health.

• Conectas, as a member of the GTPI, is responsible for five pioneering legal cases on the right to health, including: a “public civil action” on compulsory licensing for medicines; a case examining patents for pharmaceutical products; and a petition to the Brazilian Attorney General against the system for revalidating patents, known as the pipeline mechanism. In addition to this, it also carried the research for the report “Intellectual property for pharmaceutical products: a study on legislative adequacy from the viewpoint of public health and the human right to health”.