Ricardo Fraga hanging the pictures people drawn at the wall in Vila Mariana. Photo: ARTICLE 19/Facebook In 2013, Global Voices told the story of Ricardo Fraga, an agricultural engineer gagged by a Brazilian court from speaking out on the streets and the Internet against the construction of a high-rise residential complex in a vacant lot in his neighborhood in São Paulo. Since then, for 728 days his right to protest has remained legally suspended. He is under a restraining order and can't come within 1 kilometer of the high-rise complex. His Facebook page, “O outro lado do muro – Intervenção Coletiva” (The Other Side of the Wall – Collective Intervention), is forbidden to post any content related to Mofarrej Co., the contractor which owns the lot and who is responsible for the complex's construction. If he disobeys, he must pay a fee of 10,000 reais (around 3,300 US dollars). To mark the two years since the gag order, international NGO Article 19, which defends freedom of expression and has been following the case since the beginning, has organized a protest in front of the wall March 6, 2015. Fraga won't be able attend the rally, but protesters will be wearing a mask with his face to remember that #FragaQuerPostar (#FragaWantsToPost). It all started in 2011. For a few months that year, Fraga — a public servant who has worked for more than 20 years on environment and urbanism at São Paulo's City Hall — had a weekend ritual: he grabbed his kids’ white board, a few pens, a ladder and walked to the surrounding wall of a vacant lot located in São Paulo's neighborhood of Vila Mariana. Once there, Fraga invited people to climb the ladder, peek on the other side of the wall, think about what they would like to see there and draw whatever they had imagined. Soon the drawings became a Facebook page and a social movement. He told Global Voices: O movimento começou com o objetivo de promover uma reflexão sobre a forma como a cidade é apropriada, o modelo de verticalização que vem se impondo, suas consequências, o ideal de cidade que imaginamos e sobre o por que a sociedade pouco se mobiliza na preservação de espaços tão significativos. The movement started with the goal of encouraging a reflection on how the city is appropriated, the verticalization model that is being imposed and its consequences, the ideal city that we imagine and why society doesn't mobilize itself for the preservation of such meaningful spaces. But Fraga soon had other company at the wall: Mofarrej started sending real estate agents to the site. A few weekends went by with no major problems, each man in one corner — until one year later, one of the agents approached him with a threat that Fraga “did not know what could happen to him”. In 2013, the company decided to file a suit, asking for the suspension of Fraga’s protests and the Facebook page and for 100,000 reais (about 33,000 US dollars) compensation. The next day, without hearing the defendant's side, a judge issued a restraining order against Fraga, forbidding him from coming within 1 kilometer of the wall, and demanded the movement’s page be removed from Facebook. The judge ignored the demand for material compensation, but imposed the 10,000-real fine for every breach of the orders. Fraga filed an appeal in São Paulo State Court, with the support of Article 19 and a petition with 5,000 signatures supporting him. On May 15, 2013, the court upheld the judge's decision, but reduced the restraining order from 1 kilometer to one block and ruled that Fraga did not need to take down the Facebook page, but should delete all content related to Mofarrej Co. and not post any in the future. But in September 2014 the first judge handed down his final decision: the restraining order went back to 1 kilometer. Fraga filed another appeal and now waits for a final ruling from São Paulo State Court. NGO Article 19 says the decision violates article 19 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and makes Fraga into “one of the first people prohibited from protesting online by the Brazilian judiciary”. On their website, they argue that the decision didn't respect the “three-part test” (three provisions recommended respected when limiting freedom of expression: to be provided by the law, to have a legitimate aim supported by international law and to be necessary and proportional in a democratic state): Caso o teste das três partes tivesse sido observado, a restrição contra a liberdade de Ricardo não teria sido concedida visto que tal restrição não se encontra prevista em lei e o interesse econômico de comercialização dos lotes pela empresa não esta acima do interesse publico concretizado na garantia da liberdade coletiva de manifestação.