The Brazilian criminal procedure law needs reform. In contrast to the progressive Constitution of 1988, the current Code of Criminal Procedure of 1941 is repressive and highly formalistic. As to adapt the Code of Criminal Procedure to the Constitution, numerous modifications were made to the former. Despite these laws partly modifying both features of procedural and evidence law, the desired changes to the trial setting and, more importantly, in effectively safeguarding the defendant's procedural rights were not achieved. Hence, this research seeks to assess whether and to what extent the procedural safeguards afforded to Brazilian defendants at criminal trials are efficient. This was achieved by means of a comparative study where the procedural safeguards afforded to German and US-American defendants were examined. This analysis seeks to lead to the identification of the main problematic features of the Brazilian Code of criminal procedure and to make suggestions to its improvement.

Christiane Floriani Bruhn was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She obtained a Bachelor of Law's degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2005-2010). Since 2011, she is a licensed lawyer in Brazil. She was a master's student at the University of Freiburg, where she graduated with the degree of Legum Magister (2013-2016). During her doctorate at the University of Freiburg (2016-2021), Ms. Bruhn worked as a doctoral researcher and was a member of the International Research School for Comparative Criminal Law at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (renamed >Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law<).