450. The Court finds, as it has in other cases,530 that the State must publish, within six
months of notification of this judgment: (a) the official summary of this judgment prepared
by the Court, once, in the Official Gazette; (b) the official summary of this judgment prepared
by the Court, once, in a national newspaper with widespread circulation, and (c) this
judgment in its entirety, available for one year on an official website.
451. The State must immediately inform the Court when it has made each of these
publications, regardless of the one-year time frame for presenting its first report established
in the tenth operative paragraph of the judgment.
C.2. Guarantee of non-repetition: imprescriptibility of the crime of slave
labor
452. The representatives indicated that, since the case related to grave human rights
violations, the prescription of the crime of slave labor was incompatible with the American
Convention. Consequently, they asked that the State establish the imprescriptibility of this
crime and, also, that it adopt all necessary measures to ensure that prescription is not an
obstacle to the investigation and eventual punishment of those responsible for the facts of
this case.
453. The State considered the request to declare the imprescriptibility of the crime of slave
labor inadmissible for several reasons. First, it considered that the imprescriptibility of crimes
against humanity referred only to the exercise of the international criminal jurisdiction and it
was not the obligation of the States to establish this at the domestic level. Second, it argued
that, in this specific case, it was not possible to speak of a crime against humanity because
it did not relate to “a generalized and systematic attack on the civilian population” or to “a
practice applied or tolerated by the Brazilian State.” Lastly, the State indicated that article
149 of the Brazilian Penal Code was particularly broad and defined a series of conducts of
different degrees of severity that could not be classified as crimes against humanity.
454. Regarding the imprescriptibility of the crime of slavery, in Chapter VIII-1, the Court
concluded that the application of the statute of limitations in this case represented a violation
of Article 2 of the American Convention, because it was a decisive element to maintain the
impunity of the facts verified in 1997. In addition, the Court has verified the imprescriptible
nature of the crime of slavery and similar conditions in international law, as a result of their
nature as crimes under international law, whose prohibition has the status of jus cogens
(supra para. 249). In addition, the Court recalls that, according to its consistent case law, 531
crimes that involve egregious human rights violations cannot be subject to prescription.
Consequently, Brazil cannot apply a statute of limitations to this and other similar cases.
455. The Court considers that the alleged breadth of the definition of the crime established
in article 149 of the Brazilian Penal Code does not change the preceding conclusion as claimed
by the State (supra paras. 307 to 314). In this case, the Court is not declaring, in general,
that a crime established in Brazilian law is imprescriptible (the said article 149),532 but merely
the conducts that constitute slavery or a condition similar to slavery, as established in this
Cf. Case of Cantoral Benavides v. Peru. Reparations and costs. Judgment of December 3, 2001. Series C No. 88,
para. 79, and Case of Herrera Espinoza et al., para. 227.
530
See, inter alia, Case of Barrios Altos v. Peru. Merits, para. 41; Case of Trujillo Oroza v. Bolivia. Reparations and
costs. Judgment of February 27, 2002. Series C No. 92, para. 106; Case of Almonacid Arellano et al., para. 112,
and Case of Albán Cornejo et al. v. Ecuador. Merits, reparations and costs. Judgment of November 22, 2007. Series
C No. 171, para. 111.
531
Thus, for example, the Court recalls that, in the case of Almonacid Arellano, it did not declare that murder was
an imprescriptible crime in Chile in all circumstances.
532
110