Lula says the Supreme Judges must vote by secret ballot to avoid hostilities

Brazilian President Lula da Silva said on Tuesday that the individual vote of Federal Supreme Court (STF) judges should be secret and not widely advertised, as is the case now. According to Lula, the public does not need to know how each judge voted and what arguments they used to justify their vote, they just need to know the final outcome of the trial.

“If I could give one piece of advice, it would be this: It is not necessary for the public to know how a Supreme Court judge votes. I think this guy should vote and no one needs to know how he voted. The majority voted, 5 to 4, 6 to 4, 3 to 2. No one should know if Uchoa (not his name) voted, Camilo (not his name) voted. This country must learn to respect institutions. No one should love or not by the decision of the Supreme Court, nor the President of the Republic. The Supreme Court decides, we comply.

Currently, the votes of the 11 judges of the STF, often lasting several hours, are public, read by the judges themselves in sessions broadcast by TV Justiça and, depending on the case at hand, by several television channels or, in other cases, published on the Internet, ensuring full transparency all decisions. But Lula assesses that the atmosphere of hatred and constant hostility of certain sections of society towards the STF (he did not mention this, but he meant the followers of Jair Bolsonaro and the former president himself, who even urged citizens not to obey decisions emanating from him) from this court), justify the adoption of measures to ensure the safety of judges and their families, and the secrecy of the ballot will be one of them.

“In order for us not to create animosity, I think we had to start thinking about whether this is not a way for us to change what is happening in Brazil. When you go outside, you can no longer go out with your family, because there is a guy who I didn’t like his decision,” Lula reinforced.

During the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, the STF became the main target of attacks from both the then President and his supporters, since the court did not allow him to govern without restrictions, and judges such as Edson Fahim, Luis Roberto Barroso and, mainly, Alexandre de Moraes received all sorts of threats, including death threats, and was harassed at public events or when they crossed streets or restaurants with radical Bolsonarists. In one recent case, an extremist politician from the São Paulo interior with Bolsonaro ties insulted Alexandre de Moraes and even attacked the son of a justice of the peace when their families accidentally crossed paths at the Rome airport a few weeks ago.