differential treatment, considering that all three had very similar professional qualifications and experience. 13. The Judge of the 24th Criminal Court determined that the criminal action was inadmissible based on the justification that “doubts remain with respect to the actual conduct of the accused.” In addition, he affirmed that there was not certainty in the evidence presented, seeing as it was not possible to show the actual intent of the accused. 14. Not satisfied with the decision of first instance, they pursued an appeal before the Court of Appeals (Tribunal de Justiça) on November 21, 1999, as private prosecutors. The records with the respective appellate petitions and counterarguments arrived on March 22, 2000. According to information from the petitioner and drawn from the record, as of the submission of the complaint to the IACHR (December 8, 2003), the motion on appeal had not been distributed to any of the Chambers of the Court of Appeals of São Paulo. Moreover, the company NIPOMED shut down and the whereabouts of Mr. Tahara are unknown, further prejudicing the effort of Ms. Neusa Nascimento and Ms. Gisele Ferreira to seek due judicial protection from the State in relation to the violations alleged, according to the petitioner. 15. According to the petitioner, the Brazilian State assumed a commitment to guarantee the individual rights enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights at Article 1. Further, it violated the right to equality before the law, set forth in the same treaty. 16. The petitioner alleges that the Brazilian State did not respect Articles 3, on the obligation of non-discrimination; 6, which recognizes the right to work; and 7, on fair, equitable, and satisfactory working conditions, of the Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Protocol of San Salvador). 17. Nor did the Brazilian State respect Article 2 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, or Articles 2 or 3 of Convention 111 of the International Labor Organization. 18. The petitioner notes that in Brazil, racism has had a detriment impact on blacks, even though the country’s history has never known a purely segregationist regime. Racism is present in social relations of all sorts, despite the consolidation of the “myth of racial democracy,” responsible for mitigating the problem experienced by the country’s black population. The Petitioner further indicates that “the ideology of racial democracy ... induced blacks and whites to believe that the situation of social inferiority of blacks is due to their own incompetence” (complaint, p. 9). 19. The petitioner presents information on the study done by the InterAmerican Trade Union Institute for Racial Equality (INSPIR) that indicates that there is inequality for blacks of both sexes in the labor market independent of the distribution of blacks in the regions studied. The conclusion of the study is that the reason for the inequalities found between blacks and whites lies in the use of discriminatory criteria based on color/race. 20. It notes that discrimination is even more burdensome on black women who receive one to two minimum salaries. Even when they have the same level of education and perform the same functions, their salaries are always lower. Also, if one compares the salaries of black and non-black women, one finds, according to the petitioner, that the first receive 41.67% of the salaries of non-black women, on average (complaint, p. 10).