National and international challenges and experiences in the area of Public Security were discussed at the first panel of the 7th Lisbon Legal Forum, moderated by Leandro Daiello, Director General of the Federal Police in Brazil (2011-2017) and Security and Intelligence Coordinator of the Getulio Vargas Foundation — the institution that organized the meeting with the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon (FDUL) and the Brazilian Institute of Public Law (IDP).

Raul Jungmann, Minister of Public Security (2018), opened the panel stressing the urgent need for the Brazilian State to deepen the debate surrounding the prison system. “Objectively, the Brazilian state is associated with organized crime. Criminal legislation in recent years has contributed more to the aggravation of public insecurity than to its resolution,” he said. With the third largest prison population in the world, with more than half of the incarcerations involving low-impact crimes, “Brazil arrests a lot and arrests poorly”. Without socio-educational activities that favor resocialization, “society becomes a major recruiter of human resources for crime”.

Subsequently, Ibaneis Rocha, Governor of the Federal District, explained the state's crime-fighting policy under his coordination and called for more leadership from the Federal Government. According to him, the blame for the lack of security lies with the governors, but it “needs to be shared”. Incarceration is not the solution and today it has become a problem because those who are at large live by the rules of those who are in prison. “We need fast movements in the area of security,” he pointed out.

Camilo Santana, Governor of Ceará, also spoke about the difficulty of combating organized crime at the state level, presenting the Pact for the Pacific Ceará, which involved the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches in addition to the academy and civil society, with governance and accountability. This Pact was drawn up under the axes Security, Justice and Social Prevention, with the latter focusing on young people. “Brazil is losing its youth, we are losing our most precious human capital. Nobody overcame security challenges without investing in young people. The greatest public safety policy is investment in comprehensive quality education,” concluded the governor of Ceará. At the beginning of 2019, Camilo Santana called for federal reinforcement for security in the state.

Also participating in the panel were Vitalino Canas, Portuguese Deputy, Doctor of Legal and Political Sciences and professor at the FDUL, who highlighted the differences in the debates surrounding National Security in Brazil and Europe in general and most notably in Portugal, and Elton Martinez Carvalho Leme, Judge of the Court of Justice of the State of Rio de Janeiro and Professor at FGV, who spoke about the legal iatrogenesis of the fight against corruption. Iatrogenesis, explained the Judge, is a term widely used in medicine and refers to the evils of healing, to that procedure that, with the intention of curing the patient, ends up causing negative consequences that compromise their own health.

Fábio Medina Osório, Executive President of the International Institute for State Law Studies and PhD in Administrative Law from the Complutense University of Madrid, closed the panel by addressing the topic of the award-winning collaboration. Osório defends greater control under the Public Prosecutor's Office in order to guarantee greater transparency in the plea agreements. Otherwise, he warns, the MP may run the risk of seeing reforms approved in a short time that would be “harmful to its very existence”.

Check out the full Public Safety panel of the 7th Lisbon Legal Forum: