Maria Odete Freire de Araújo

Maria Odete Freire de Araújo

Federal labour judge in Brazil

ChainGE Lab Research Fellow

Maria Odete Freire de Araújo has been a Federal labour judge in Brazil since 2016. Before that, she worked as a clerk for ten years, also in the Brazilian Labour Court. She is also a Member of the committee that drafted the Protocol for Anti-Discriminatory Judgments in the Brazilian Labour Judiciary, in the specific group for combating modern slavery; and Member of the National Judicial Executive Committee to Combat the Exploitation of Labor in Conditions Similar to Slavery and Human Trafficking, since 2024. Finally, she is a Ph.D. candidate at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).

Her doctoral research focuses on the liability of leading companies in production chains (domestic and global), from a global south perspective, with the aim of safeguarding minimum standards of protection and dignity for workers. To this end, it delves into questions about existing regulations in the global north, the lack of regulations on the matter in Brazil and how the state has been confronting the power of the companies that lead the GVC economic scenario .

She intends to contribute to the ChainGE Lab by researching the responsibility of leading companies in value chains from a global south perspective.