Commitments on Human Rights and Foreign Policy of the Brazilian government

The Brazilian Committee on Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Conectas is the general co-secretary, calls for audiences with the Ministers Antonio Patriota (Foreign Affairs), Maria do Rosário (Secretary of Human Rights) and Gilberto Carvalho (Secretariat of the Presidency). The objective of these meetings is to resume the human rights commitments and the policy external campaign, adopted by the then candidate Dilma Rousseff during the seminar "Human Rights and Foreign Policy", in June 2010, in Brasilia.

At that time, presidential candidate?s representatives adhered to an agenda of ten commitments, which are related to three main points. (Click here to read it in Portuguese).

The first one deals with Brazil?s obligations due to international and regional agreements on human rights and to the National Program for Human Rights. The Committee remembers that the government has failed to comply with the deadline for submission of reports concerned to the enforcement of human rights in Brazil, to international organs that monitorise these agreements.

Secondly, the Committee considers important for Dilma?s term, the prevalence of human rights in foreign policy through the dialogue
between Brazil and other countries. The organizations that comprise the Committee emphasized there must be a primacy of those rights on other interests.

Finally, the meeting with these ministers aims to emphasize the guarantee of citizen participation, the control of foreign policy by the access to
information, and to hold public consultations on performance country's international human rights, as well as to interchange with other branches of the government.