Lei para inglês ver

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Lei para inglês ver to German literally "law, that the Englishman sees [something]" is a phrase of the Brazilian and European Portuguese that the circumstance of the hypocrisy but not actually enforced describes when laws or regulations adopted only in appearance . It is believed that the phrase refers to the alleged, but not actual, abolition of slavery by the Brazilian interim rulers, who decided to do so under economic and political pressure from the British government.

origin

After a long, sometimes monopoly-like dominance in the slave trade, the British government turned against slavery on moral grounds. The slave trade was banned in 1808 and slavery was generally banned in the British Empire in 1833 . At the global political level, too, the British government tried to live up to its abolitionist claim and put pressure on other states to also abolish slavery.

In 1826 the British government enforced the abolition of the slave trade against the Empire of Brazil within three years, but the signed cease and desist treaty was not implemented. The British government then exerted massive pressure: on the one hand via British banks, on whose loans the Brazilian coffee producers in particular relied, and via coffee exports, for which Great Britain was the largest sales market at the time. This pressure led to the fact that the three-member provisional Regency Council - who ruled the country between 1831 and 1840 due to the minority of Pedro II - passed the law of November 7, 1831, in which arriving African slaves in Brazilian ports were declared free.

Within the Brazilian population up to the imperial court and the Chamber of Deputies, however, the enforcement of this law was not taken seriously, so that the interim regent Diogo Antônio Feijó is said to have said that this was only "a law so that the English could see something".

There was an actual end to slavery in Brazil from 1850, after the Brazilian Minister of Justice Eusébio de Queiroz had taken up the topic and on September 4, 1850, the Lei Eusébio de Queirós (Lei n ° 581) passed. The law passed in 1831 actually came into effect in the 1880s as part of the fight against slavery.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Occasionally, this phrase is also used in the plural - Leis para inglês , although in the historical case it was actually a single act of law.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Luis Gustavo Santos Cota: Não só “para inglês ver”: justiça, escravidão e abolicionismo em Minas Gerais . In: História Social . No. 21 . IFCH / UNICAMP, 2011, ISSN  2178-1141 , p. 65-97 (Brazilian Portuguese, unicamp.br [accessed March 1, 2016]).
  2. ↑ a b c Argemiro Eloy Gurgel: Uma Lei para inglês ver: a trajetória da Lei de 7 de novembro de 1831. (PDF) February 14, 2008, accessed on March 1, 2016 (Brazilian Portuguese).
  3. ↑ Lei nº 581, de 4 de Setembro de 1850. Estabelece medidas para a repressão do trafico de africanos neste Imperio. In: www.planalto.gov.br. Presidência da República, Casa Civil, accessed July 9, 2019 (Brazilian Portuguese).