The Work and Development Research Group at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Sao Paulo Law School has signed a technical cooperation agreement with Datalawyer, a company that develops technology products applied to the legal world, with a focus on the use of jurimetrics tools.

The partnership will provide access to the licenses and training offered by the platform in order to enable broader and more agile jurisprudential research in relation to the analysis of International Labor Organization Convention 190, which establishes standards for combating harassment in the workplace. Approved in 2019, this convention has now been ratified by 44 countries.

Although Brazil has not yet ratified this convention, it is currently being examined by Congress. In addition, an exploratory study of this subject found that the convention has already been cited in more than Brazilian 150 court decisions, which mentioned the standard for different reasons: either to fill a regulatory gap or as an argumentative reinforcement.

In this context, the overall goal of the Work and Development Research Group’s study on this topic is to understand the possible impacts of ILO Convention 190 on Brazilian law, seeking to verify the international standard’s contributions, how Brazilian courts have applied it, and whether its application has had an impact on the judiciary’s understanding of workplace harassment. To this end, case law research will be carried out using jurimetrics software provided by Datalawyer.

“The use of this tool will be fundamental in allowing the group to analyze a larger volume of cases and compare decisions that use and don’t use the convention,” explains Olivia Pasqualeto, the group’s coordinator. “This way, we’ll be able to better understand how case law evolves in this area in different labor courts.”

According to Caio Santos, the CEO of Datalawyer, the application of jurimetrics to this research will guarantee in-depth and agile analysis. “Our big data database contains more than 20 million labor cases, so it is possible to assess the reasons why judges do or do not consider ILO Convention 190 and how cases that deal with workplace harassment but do not mention this convention are judged. Our AI tools understand the context of legal documents and carry out semantic analysis on a case-by-case basis, for example,” he explains.

About ILO Convention 190

International Labor Organization Convention 190, approved in 2019 by the International Labor Conference, is in the process of being ratified by the Brazilian state, through Message on International Agreements, Covenants, Treaties and Acts 86 of 2023.

The convention deals with harassment and violence at work and proposes measures to be taken to eradicate such practices. It is an innovative instrument in relation to international and domestic law, as it proposes a very broad concept of harassment, uses a personal scope not centered solely on employment relationships, and recognizes that work-related situations are not related to the physical premises of employers, among other things.

Thus, if the convention is ratified and effectively incorporated into Brazilian law, it is likely to bring about profound changes in the way harassment and violence at work are treated, especially considering that the concept of harassment is not sufficiently regulated in Brazilian labor legislation (it is only mentioned in the Brazilian Bar Association’s Code of Ethics) and that the personal scope of Brazilian labor law is predominantly focused on employees.

For more information about ILO Convention 190, click here.