Brasilia: The Supreme Federal Court (STF) of Brazil will resume the trial today to evaluate whether a court in the southern city of Curitiba can try and convict former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Prensa Latina publishes.
By nine votes to two, the plenary session of the STF decided yesterday that it is up to the 11 ministers of the court and not their second class, to judge the appeals against a decision by Minister Luiz Edson Fachin.
This magistrate decreed on March 8 the incompetence of the thirteenth Federal Criminal Court of Curitiba to rule on cases involving Lula and annulled his sentences.
Fachin considered that court inept to process the cases of Guarujá’s triplex apartment, the Atibaia farm, in addition to two files involving the Lula Institute.
With that determination, the convictions of the founder of the Workers’ Party (PT) were repealed and he returned to have all his political rights.
However, the minister preserved the violations of secrecy, the interceptions and the material resulting from the notes and seizures.
The records, which were in Curitiba, were sent to the Federal Justice of the Federal District, by order of the judge.
The trial will resume this Thursday and the STF ministers will consider whether or not they confirm Fachin’s ruling and whether the decision on the suspicion of partiality of former judge Sérgio Moro, former head of the Curitiba court, lost the object.
Other questions posed by the Attorney General’s Office and Lula’s lawyers have yet to be voted on and evaluated.
The magistrate Ricardo Lewandowski ruled against the analysis of the plenary session and affirmed that “it causes surprise”, since the chambers judge thousands of appeals a year.
“The last time this was done, with that habeas corpus, which discussed the presumption of innocence, it cost the former president (Lula) 580 days in prison and caused him to be unable to run for the presidency of the Republic,” he warned.
According to Lewandowski, the ‘natural judge’ at the time was outmatched. “The issue was brought to the plenary in an exception that I think the Supreme Court has to explain,” he added.
“Every time it comes to the former president, the case changes the issue,” he remarked.
The website Brasil 247 assured that the judgment in the Supreme Court generated apprehension in the main leaders of the PT.
It is feared that the precautionary measure will be maintained, but at the same time future debates about Moro’s arbitrariness will lose their point, as Fachin argued.
In this case, Lula would maintain his political rights, but would be open to the possibility of further convictions, especially in the case of the Atibaia site, and would again withdraw from the presidential race in 2022. (BSH)
