Advocates praise the move but say it’s overdue and are they’re looking closely at how it is enforced across the country.
Members of journalists and human rights organizations traveled to Brasília this month to sign guidance on how authorities across Brazil share information and coordinate investigations into crimes against journalists.
At a ceremony held on April 7, Journalist’s Day, Justice Minister Wellington Silva signed a measure establishing national guidelines within the country’s Unified Public Security System, known as SUSP, which was created in 2018. It’s called the National Protocol for Investigating Crimes against Journalists and Communicators.
“Investigating properly means understanding the context of journalistic activity; preserving evidence; hearing victims and witnesses in a safe environment; avoiding revictimization; protecting source confidentiality; and acting with urgency,” Silva said at the ceremony.
Many press freedom advocates welcomed the initiative as a step toward reducing impunity for crimes against journalists. Others said it was long overdue and cautioned that its impact will depend on how, and whether, the guidelines are enforced.
In a statement to LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), the Ministry of Justice and Public Security said that Brazil’s states and the Federal District are not automatically required to adopt the new standards.
Years in the making
Marcelo Rech, president of the National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), told LJR that, although Brazil has important constitutional guarantees for the practice of journalism, there has been no national protocol aimed at investigating crimes against journalists within the public security system, until now.
“Currently, in most cases, episodes of violence are treated as common crimes, without specific guidelines to assess the relationship between the offense and the exercise of journalistic activity,” Rech said. “And impunity is very high.”
Samira de Castro, president of the National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ), said this protocol is an unprecedented milestone in regards to national public policies.
“This has been a longstanding demand of the organization since 2013, when the June protests highlighted an escalation of violence against journalists,” she told LJR.
Since then, Castro said the federation has been systematizing data, reporting cases and advocating for the creation of institutional mechanisms for protection and combating impunity.
“This did not come from nothing. It’s the result of more than a decade of advocacy, data research and institutional pressure,” Castro said, sharing that their annual reports help orient the protocol by exposing patterns of violence, profiles of the victims and recurring failures in investigations.
There was one infamous failure – the killing of journalist Pedro Palma – that helped trigger the development of the protocol, said Dyego Pegorario, coordination supervisor at the Vladimir Herzog Institute.
On the night of Feb. 13, 2014, Palma was shot to death in Miguel Pereira, a town located in rural Rio de Janeiro state. According to police, two individuals on a motorcycle shot Palma three times in front of his home, killing him on the spot. Nine years later, the investigation into his killing was still open and no one had been held responsible.
“At that time, Reporters Without Borders, Free Press Unlimited, ABRAJI and others produced a report that said the impunity in the case resulted from the fact that Pedro Palma’s role as a journalist was disregarded during the investigation,” Pegorario told LJR.
He added that there is a strong perception that crimes against journalists go unpunished —regarding both perpetrators and the masterminds— precisely because this information is ignored during the investigation.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 44 journalists and media workers have been killed in Brazil since 1992 for reasons related to their work.
And the most recent data on violations against freedom of expression in Brazil show there were 66 cases of non-lethal violence in 2025, affecting at least 80 media professionals according to Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (ABERT).
ABERT President Cristiano Flôres argued that, despite a reduction in the numbers of cases and victims compared to the previous year, “the press continues to be a target of intolerance toward opposing views, with verbal attacks, hate campaigns and harassment.”
Remaining room for progress
Journalists say the protocol is an important step forward, but some from marginalized communities are hesitant to celebrate just yet.
“When I read about the protocol, the first thing I thought was: how long did it take for the State to realize that journalists need special protection,” freelance reporter Paola Churchill, who is currently surveying attacks against women journalists in Brazil, told LJR.
“I’ve been covering gender for years and have already experienced situations that made me question whether it was worth continuing,” Churchill said. “Measures like this matter as recognition, but recognition alone doesn’t protect anyone. For women journalists, the risk remains very real, and a protocol without real enforcement changes little in our day-to-day lives.”
Indigenous journalist Grazy Kaimbé told LJR that one of the greatest concerns of her people, as well as of their communicators and independent journalists, is the expansion of drug trafficking organizations within their territories.
“In many of those territories the State’s presence is precarious, to say the least, so this might weaken the efficacy of the protocol,” she said.
Castro said the concern among freelancers and professionals outside major urban centers is legitimate, as many of the most serious cases occur in the interior of the country, involving radio broadcasters and independent communicators who have less institutional protection.
“The protocol by itself does not solve the problem. It is a tool. Its effectiveness will depend on the adherence of the states, the training of the police, the actions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary, and the ongoing pressure from civil society,” she told LJR.
Currently, the protocol is still in an official guidance form and will need formal regulations moving forward. Pegorario says it will be important to reinforce it into a decree.
“We are already aiming to develop training sessions in the near future with legal professionals and public agency officials, with the objective of equipping them to combat impunity for crimes against journalists and communicators, as well as to fight judicial harassment, which is one of the issues we have seen intensify in the silencing of journalists and communicators in the country in recent years,” he said.
Artur Romeu, director of Reporters Without Borders in Latin American, told LJR that the protocol incentivizes agreements between civil society organizations, media associations and international organizations.
“This suggests next steps: outreach actions with newsrooms and professionals, the creation of permanent channels for dialogue and the strengthening of the role of the Observatory of Violence against Journalists,” he said. “The protocol can serve as a basis for a broader national policy for the protection of journalists, coordinated with existing mechanisms, such as the program for the protection of human rights defenders, communicators and environmentalists.”
