In July the Attorney General requested that the investigation into the killing of 12 people by the police in February 2015 in Cabula, Bahia state, be transferred to a federal authority. On 6 November, five men, who had disappeared on 21 October after being approached by law enforcement officials, were found dead in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo. The bodies showed signs of executions and initial investigations by authorities indicated the involvement of municipal guards. On 17 November, four young men were shot dead by the military police unit ROTA in Jabaquara, São Paulo. ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES On 1 February, 12 military police officers were found guilty and sentenced for the crimes of torture followed by death, procedural fraud and “occultation of a corpse” in the case of the enforced disappearance of Amarildo de Souza in Rio de Janeiro. In April, police investigations named 23 military police officers as suspects in the enforced disappearance of 16-year-old Davi Fiuza in the city of Salvador, Bahia state, in October 2014. However, the case failed to reach the Public Prosecutor’s Office and none of the accused had faced trial by the end of 2016. PRISON CONDITIONS Prisons remained severely overcrowded, with reports of torture and other ill-treatment. According to the Ministry of Justice, by the end of 2015 the prison system had a population of more than 620,000, although the overall capacity was around 370,000 people. Prison riots took place throughout the country. In October, 10 men were beheaded or burned alive in a prison in Roraima state and eight men died of asphyxiation in a cell during a prison fire in Rondônia state. On 8 March the UN Special Rapporteur on torture reported, among other things, poor living conditions and the regular occurrence Amnesty International Report 2016/17 of torture and other ill-treatment of inmates by police and prison guards in Brazil. In September a court of appeals declared null a trial and sentences against 74 police officers for a massacre in Carandiru prison in 1992; 111 men had been killed by the police in the massacre. FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY The year was marked by a number of largely peaceful protests throughout the country on issues such as the impeachment process, education reform, violence against women, negative impacts of the 2016 Olympic Games and reduction of public spending in health care and education. The police response was frequently violent, leading to excessive and unnecessary use of force. Students peacefully occupied up to 1,000 public schools in the country to question the education reform and investment cuts proposed by the government. In June, police in the city of Rio de Janeiro used unnecessary and excessive force to break up a peaceful protest by students in the Secretary of Education headquarters. The police used unnecessary force in several states to disperse demonstrations against the new government and the proposed constitutional amendment (PEC 241/55) that would restrict public spending. In São Paulo, a student lost the vision in her left eye after the police launched a stun grenade that exploded near her. In January, Rafael Braga Vieira, a man who had been detained after a protest in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, was again detained on trumped-up charges of drug trafficking. On 10 August a state court failed to acknowledge the state’s responsibility for the loss of vision in one eye of Sergio Silva after he was hit by a device shot by police during a 2013 protest in São Paulo. The court considered that, by being at the protest, he had implicitly accepted the risk of being injured by the police. In March the Anti-terrorism Law (13.260/2016) was approved in Congress and sanctioned by the President. The law was widely criticized for its vague language 93