Brazil rarely convicts anyone for slave labour, and a 2024 rule lets the labour minister move employers off its 'dirty list', a UN investigator warned.
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The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery's report on Brazil (A/HRC/63/36/Add.1, dated July 7, 2026, after an August 2025 visit) found 'the rates of prosecution and conviction are low, leading to rampant impunity,' with Federal Police statistics showing slavery-offence inquiries since 2024 took over a year on average and no consolidated data on how long prosecutions take; the constitutional power to expropriate property where slave labour is found (article 243) has never been given effect by law or regulation. It also found that Interministerial Ordinance No. 18/2024 lets employers who sign conduct-adjustment agreements, including ones concluded by the Minister of Labour and Employment, be moved from the public register of employers caught using slave labour (the 'dirty list') to a separate registry, raising concerns about a two-tier system and political interference that 'could seriously jeopardize the effectiveness of the dirty list.' The report credits Brazil's Special Mobile Inspection Group with rescuing more than 66,000 people since 1995 and welcomes the hiring of 900 more labour inspectors.
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