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| Richard Reeves (center), co-director
of UGA’s International Judicial Training Program
and director of the Institute for Continuing Legal
Education, talks with (from left): Antonio Cezar Caula
Reis, a state attorney from Pernambuco; (to Reeves’ left)
translator Allesandra Vidal; Antonio De P.C. Camarotti
Filho, a justice of the court; and Roberto Pimentel
Teixeira, also a state attorney from Pernambuco. (Photo
by Peter Frey) |
In the state of Pernambuco, Brazil,
there is a special mobile court system that travels to
soccer games and tries overly rowdy sports fans, called
hooligans, on the spot.
There may not be such a court in the U.S., but there are
other models that are influential for the group of 28 justices,
judges, lawyers and court personnel who visited the Dean
Rusk Center
late last semester as part of the International Judicial
Training Program.
Among them was Fausto Freitas, the chief justice in Pernambuco
who created the hooligan court.
“The most important thing is the exchange experience
with another system,” he said of the visit, noting
that he particularly enjoyed witnessing the relative dignity
given to the inmates at the penitentiary he visited in
Gwinnett County.
A concrete result of studying the U.S. court system is
the advent of public education programs and courts dedicated
to drugs and domestic violence, said Fernando Cerqueira,
a supreme court justice and director of international studies
of Pernambuco’s state judicial college. He is the
Brazilian coordinator for the UGA partnership.
“We were the first drug court in Latin America, and
this comes from this training program,” he said.
The IJTP is co-directed by María Eugenia Giménez,
associate director of the Rusk Center, and Richard D. Reaves,
executive director of the Institute for Continuing Judicial
Education in Georgia. Cerqueira has attended six times,
and calls the U.S. “my second country.” On
this visit, he said, the group was most interested in learning
about mediation and conflict resolution, in an effort to
help reduce lengthy lawsuits.
“There is something we’d really like to introduce
to our system—the mediation before the litigation,” he
said. “We are studying very efficiently here how
the courts work with this, and how we can introduce this
to our system.” |
