Brazilian lawmakers appeal to international human rights org over state censorship efforts

Some Brazilian legislators, along with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, are challenging Brazil's censorship attempts this year before an international governing body, asking them to condemn the censorship and uphold free speech.

ADF International is representing five Brazilian legislators before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the country's state-driven censorship crisis and their 39-day ban on X earlier this year. 

Senator Eduardo Girao, as well as members of the Chamber of Deputies Marcel Van Hattem, Adriana Ventura, Gilson Marques and Ricardo Salles, are asking the Commission to act swiftly to hold Brazil accountable for its free speech obligations and expose the country's alleged censorial efforts. 

Van Hattem said Brazil has seen an egregious silencing of political voices, citizens, journalists or anyone else who might share different viewpoints from the government in recent years. He said this includes Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes who ordered the "immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations" in the country on Aug. 30 after the platform refused to comply with government orders to shut down accounts it has singled out for censorship.  

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"This is a major violation of all Brazilians' free speech and expression rights. We can't afford to lose Brazil to authoritarianism, which is why I am taking my case to the international level with the help of ADF International," Van Hattem said. "These attempts to silence and censor cannot be allowed to stand."  

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has jurisdiction over Brazil as a State Party to the American Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of speech, including prohibitions on prior restraint or censoring expression before it has occurred, as well as special protections for political speech. 

The legislators are claiming violations of their rights under the Convention, including their freedom of expression and equal protection under the law, as a result of escalating state censorship. They argue censorship has been on the rise in Brazil since 2019 and recently came to a head during X's ban ahead of elections earlier this year. 

The legislators noted that state-sponsored censorship, including the 39-day ban of X, is "disproportionate and of dubious legal basis" and "has affected the conventional rights of the Victims in a direct, particular, and serious way," according to the legal challenge they filed with the Commission.  

The petition goes on to say that the country’s X blockade "violated the rights of more than twenty million people in Brazil who are users of the platform, having prevented them from accessing the dissemination and reception of information during that time."

Julio Pohl, ADF International’s lead legal counsel on the case, said Brazilian authorities blatantly clamped down on the free speech rights of over 20 million Brazilians by shutting down X ahead of the national elections. 

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"While the ban was eventually lifted, the fact remains that millions of Brazilians, including the five legislators now taking their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, were subjected to unlawful censorship during a critical time in their country," he said. "Censorship has no place in a free society, and it’s time for the Commission to intervene and condemn the vast and ongoing violations of free speech being perpetrated by Brazilian authorities." 

Eduardo Girao, senator for Brazil and party to the petition, echoed a similar sentiment, arguing that despite the ban's lift, Brazil is still facing a very serious censorship problem. 

"While our constitution protects our rights to speak and express ourselves freely as citizens of Brazil, Brazilians throughout the country are afraid to share their beliefs for fear of persecution and punishment," he said. "We must push back against censorship in our country, and it is my hope that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will fulfill its obligation to condemn the human rights violations that are taking place in our country."  

In September, over 100 individuals, including former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, journalist Michael Shellenberger, five US Attorneys General and Senior UK, US, European and Latin American politicians and professors, signed an open letter to the Brazilian Congress, demanding an end to the "censorship crisis" in which X was banned nationwide in the South American country. Owner Elon Musk previously thanked the Commission and ADF International for intervening in Brazil, following its ban of X.

Mike Benz, a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the free speech watchdog organization, the Foundation For Freedom Online, appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast earlier this month, where he discussed the so-called "censorship industrial complex." He said U.S. agencies, including the State Department, have pressured Brazil to adopt censorship laws as part of a broader strategy to counter populist movements globally and "effectively control every election or at least tilt every election around the world."

"They've sprawled this into 140 countries and Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon, arguing that if you don't allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Niger and Brazil and Venezuela and Central and Eastern Europe," he said. 

"You're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter-misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world or populists will win the election around the world," he added. "And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region, and they've built this enormous capacity."

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Benz discussed how U.S. funding of NGOs like the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS) have helped implement censorship frameworks in countries like Brazil. 

"This CEPPS program is basically in large part the reason that the Brazil censorship state was erected," he said. "This came a little bit later in the game, but it's a spawn out of this NED [National Endowment for Democracy] censorship network. This [was] explicitly created by the CIA director, self-confessed effectively, CIA cutout."

"What CEPPS does is they manage an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region," he added. "So capacity building is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means building up an asset so that it has the capability to be instrumentalized by the U.S. State Department."

Tomás Henríquez, director of advocacy for Latin America, told Fox News Digital that the state-sponsored clampdown on free speech is deplorable and must come to a swift end. He called out the "censorship industrial complex," adding it demands a response from the very institutions mandated to uphold free speech and free expression. 

"As governments across the globe are finding ways to sneak censorship into free societies, we are glad to see lawmakers and free speech advocates push back, exposing the web of actors that collude to restrict speech," he said. 

"Mike Benz recently spoke out against the ‘censorship industrial complex’ on the Joe Rogan podcast, exposing the various U.S. actors that have fueled censorship Brazil. Benz is right to call out this egregious act of foreign interference," he added. "The US should be doing everything in its power to promote free speech, not drive censorship abroad."