"New York, September 29, 2021 — Brazilian authorities should release sports blogger Paulo Cezar de Andrade Prado and stop using defamation laws to harass and imprison journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Yesterday morning, São Paulo state civil police officers arrested Prado, who covers sports and politics on his blog Blog do Paulinho, at his home, according to news reports, a video summarizing the case that Prado recorded before his arrest, and his lawyer, Daniel Casagrande, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. Casagrande told CPJ that the police were acting on the open arrest order issued by the 26th Criminal Court of São Paulo state on February 23 to enforce a five-month prison sentence for Prado, in relation to a criminal defamation case that has been ongoing since 2016, as CPJ documented at the time."
