Brazil has the world’s strictest laws against racist speech But it is unclear what the rocketing number of prosecutions is achieving Jul 30th 2026 RACIST language is neither new nor uncommon. But around the world governments are showing growing willingness to treat it as a crime. In recent years landmark jail sentences for racist insults have been handed down in Belgium, South Africa and Spain. New laws prohibiting hate speech are on the books in Canada, Australia and Singapore. No country has gone further than Brazil. In 2021 its Supreme Court issued a ruling equating racial insults, which are directed at an individual, with racism itself, understood as discrimination against an entire group, which is banned under the constitution. Racist slurs became a crime with stiff penalties. Congress subsequently gave the decision statutory effect. The
constitution offers no statute of limitations for racism, so offenders can be prosecuted years after the fact. Penalties include jail time and hefty fines. The number of people prosecuted for racism has increased dramatically, but it is not clear that this is doing much to curb racial inequality or prejudice. Its main achievement may simply be to make Brazil’s judiciary feel virtuous while angering racists even more. As the rest of the world considers how to tackle hate speech, Brazil provides some useful lessons. Brazil’s zealous laws are a response to a historical wrong. Of the 12m people trafficked from Africa to the Americas between 1501 and 1866, almost 5m disembarked in Brazil, more than anywhere else. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. In recent years a growing black- rights movement has led more Brazilians to identify as preto (black) or pardo (mixed-race or brown) in the census. Today they make up slightly over half the population. The prosecution of racist speech has been turbocharged. The number of racism cases brought before the courts each month has increased ten-fold since 2021. (see chart) Some 931 people are serving prison sentences for racism or racial abuse—460 of them behind bars, the rest in regimes that let them work outside by day.
Ignorant tourists are being ensnared, too. Five foreigners have been detained for racist speech this year. One, Agostina Páez, a 29-year-old Argentine woman, was filmed making monkey gestures at black bartenders in Rio de Janeiro. Another Argentine, Eduardo Ignacio Murias, took photos of a black child on a train and sent them to a friend on WhatsApp, writing that “I’m thinking of bringing home a slave, there’s so many of them here.” He was arrested after a fellow passenger alerted the child’s mother. Mr Murias is in pre-trial detention in Brazil, while Ms Páez has been allowed to return to Argentina while she awaits trial by a Brazilian court. Supporters of the new regime point to the publicity around these incidents as one of its benefits. It “shows people what racism looks like and that it is not allowed in our society”, says Alessandra Benedito of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in São Paulo. “These laws make a difference, not just because they punish but because they teach, they raise awareness among the rest of the population.” Awareness-raising is one thing, but racial inequality remains stark. The World Bank reckons that Brazil is one of the world’s most unequal countries outside southern Africa. In 2021 the census found that the average per person earnings of white households were double those of black or mixed- race households—a gap that has not narrowed since Brazil’s statistics agency began collecting the data in 2012. The hourly wage for black Brazilian women is about 30% lower than that of white men in similar jobs, even after controlling for education, location and sector of employment. Racist speech is not a primary cause. Brazil’s shoddy public-education system is. The gap between the test scores of public and private secondary- school students is larger in Brazil than anywhere else in Latin America. Richer Brazilians, who tend to be white, do what they can to keep their children out of the public system. Poor grades for those who do attend often lead them to lower-quality universities, to read subjects tending towards lower-paying jobs. Mauricio Reis of the Institute for Applied Economics in Rio de Janeiro reckons this accounts for a third of the gap in median earnings between whites and blacks. And even as Brazil’s police forces are opening units specialising in racist speech, they are also killing thousands of black people every year.
According to the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, a non-profit that compiles crime statistics, black Brazilians were three and a half times as likely to be killed by the police as white ones in 2025. There is little evidence that the police are targeting non-whites deliberately, rather than tending to police poorer neighbourhoods, but the volume of deaths is staggering. Brazilian police kill nine times more people than do officers in the United States, when adjusted for population size. Rather than addressing the causes of inequality, Brazil’s muscular hate- speech laws can undermine free speech. In May 2023 a court in São Paulo convicted a comedian, Leonardo Lins, of using racist speech. Mr Lins, who is known for his distasteful jokes, was sentenced to eight years and three months in a high-security prison. He was also ordered to pay fines of 1.7m reais (around $330,000). Only in February did a higher court overturn the conviction. Racist speech is vile. That does not mean it is a good idea to make it illegal. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/07/27/brazil-has-the-worlds-strictest- laws-against-racist-speech
New strikes in Iran show the weakness of Donald Trump’s deal Saudi Arabia is locked in a dangerous stand-off with the Houthis The International Criminal Court puts its house in order West Africa has become a huge cocaine-trading hub Why Rwandans are warming to dogs
Middle East & Africa | Doom loop in the Gulf New strikes in Iran show the weakness of Donald Trump’s deal The two sides are trapped in a cycle of fighting and half-baked attempts at diplomacy Jul 30th 2026 THE CALENDAR says it is July, but the headlines look like April. The war between America and Iran has ebbed but not ended. The Strait of Hormuz is in effect shut, but Gulf states are trying to broker a deal that would reopen it, at least temporarily. Donald Trump retreated from his threat to launch a “massive attack” on Iran and claimed negotiations were going well, only for Iran to reject the latest proposed deal and fire another round of missiles. That was the state of play for much of spring, until America and Iran signed an interim peace deal on June 17th. And so it is again. Under the terms of that “memorandum of understanding” (MOU), the two countries should be
almost done negotiating a comprehensive pact to end five decades of hostility. Instead they are back to haggling over the strait. Even if diplomats manage to find a solution, which looks unlikely, it may be only a patch on a deal that was threadbare to begin with. The MOU began to unravel on July 6th, when Iran attacked several oil and gas tankers. It did so to halt growing traffic through the southern side of Hormuz, which lies in Omani territorial waters and thus diminishes Iran’s control of the waterway. America then began almost two weeks of daily air strikes, mostly aimed at military targets and economic infrastructure in southern Iran. The regime launched missiles and drones at American bases in the Gulf and Jordan. On July 24th, though, Mr Trump abruptly halted the bombing campaign. In public, American officials said they were keen to give diplomacy a chance. Privately some also worry about a dwindling supply of air-defence interceptors and fret that limited air strikes have little value. Iran also stopped attacking commercial ships, although that may have simply reflected a lack of targets: the number of vessels using the southern passage through Hormuz has dropped close to zero. Last weekend a delegation of Omani officials visited Tehran for talks. Though Iran is not speaking directly to the Americans, Oman is acting as an intermediary. It offered Iran a proposal that includes a formal truce, perhaps lasting ten days, and a plan to reopen the strait. Iran and littoral Arab states would manage it through a joint mechanism. Ships would not pay a toll for transit, but the consortium could collect “voluntary contributions” for navigational aids, environmental services and the like, similar to what South-East Asian nations do in the Strait of Malacca. In theory this offered everyone a face-saving compromise. Iran could say it had imposed a new arrangement on the strait, while America could say it had refused Iran’s demand for full control and mandatory fees. Gulf states would get free passage. The trouble is that Oman has proposed a similar arrangement in the past—only for Iran to repeatedly reject it. Sure enough, it refused this one too. Kazem Gharibabadi, its deputy foreign minister, said on July 28th that any deal must give Iran full control over