Brazilian ambassador lambasts street children article

Brazil’s ambassador to Cairo has strongly condemned a highly contentious opinion piece about street children published last week in the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper.

Award-winning writer and university professor Nasser Abdallah’s article, published on June 20 and titled “The Brazilian Solution,” called for the mass slaughter of Egypt’s street children. It said that in the 1990s, police in Brazil organized mass killings of street children in order to control their rising numbers.

Today, one week later, Brazilian ambassador Marco Brando published a letter in the same paper, saying the article “highly offends Brazil and its people.” 

The information in the article, he wrote, “has no factual basis.”

Having caused an immediate uproar on social media after Al-Masry Al-Youm published it in print and online, the piece was removed from the website the same day. The paper released a statement online saying the article had been taken down based on advice from its legal team, which said it incited violence.

“The newspaper published the article based on the reader’s right to knowledge, and in an exercise of the right of free speech. But once again, with respect to the rights of the reader and society, we removed it,” the Al-Masry Al-Youm statement said.

Abdallah, a professor at Sohag University’s philosophy department, had written that street children were killed en mass in Brazil just like stray dogs.

“The Brazilian solution managed to clear the main Brazilian roads of street children and push those who remained [alive] to go back to the slums. But this success was not due to the harsh Brazilian solution, but first and foremost to the Brazilian political leadership’s will for reform,” he wrote.

Brando refuted this notion as baseless.

“There were no general policies about executing street children in Brazil, contrary to what the article states,” his response states, adding that policies related to neglected children always sought to protect them from violence they often face on the streets.

He went on to list the laws passed to protect children’s rights as well as the UN treaties and protocols Brazil has signed to this end, further cementing them in the country’s legislation.

“Any violence against street children, even if carried out by security forces, is investigated by Brazil’s judiciary,” he wrote.

The Egyptian Coalition for Children's Rights released an statement announcing it would file a complaint against Abdallah and Al-Masry Al-Youm for publishing an article that directly calls for the mass execution of children, in violation of all international agreements and constitutional principles.