Brazil: keys to understanding the judicial situation of Lula da Silva after the annulment of his sentences

03/08/2021 18:50

• Clarín.com

• World

Updated 03/08/2021 18:50

The decision of a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Brazil to annul this Monday

all the corruption convictions that had been handed down

against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva not only obliges the Justice to restart all its processes, but also enables the former president to return to contest elections.

The magistrate Luiz Edson Fachin, in an individual decision in response to a petition for habeas corpus that can still be appealed before the plenary session of the Supreme Federal Court, determined that the court 13 of Curitiba, of first instance and whose head was the now former minister Sergio Moro , he had no jurisdiction to judge Lula.

Fachin annulled all the decisions in the first instance of the Curitiba court and determined that the processes be restarted by a federal court in Brasilia.

How is your legal situation?

With the annulment of the sentences in the first instance, Lula

returns to the status of defendant for corruption in the four processes

that had already passed through the Curitiba court, including in two in which Moro's decisions were confirmed by the second instance courts.

These are the processes in which he was convicted for allegedly having received

a beach apartment in the Guarujá resort

in exchange for favoring a construction company in contracts with the state oil company Petrobras;

and in which he was considered guilty of corruption due to the millionaire reforms that different companies made in a country house where the former president spent weekends, despite the fact that it was not his property.

In the first case he was sentenced to

8 years in prison and in the second to 17 years

.

The decision also

annulled two processes

in which he is tried for supposedly illegal donations and favors received by the Lula Institute from Petrobras contractor companies, and for illegal commissions from Odebrecht, in which there were still no sentences.

A follower of the former president in Brasilia.

AP Photo

The four processes will have to be restarted by a court in Brasilia on a date yet to be defined and whose owner will have to decide initially if he considers the accusations from the Prosecutor's Office to be appropriate and opens a trial to the socialist leader.

Fachin's decision, however,

can still be annulled in the plenary session of the Supreme Court

in case the Prosecutor's Office appeals it, something that is already being studied.

How is your political situation?

With the confirmation of both convictions by second instance courts, which also lost validity with the new decision, Lula was automatically disqualified politically and could not contest the 2018 presidential elections, in which he appeared as a favorite in the polls.

Lula even

spent 580 days in prison

and was released once the Supreme Court altered his own jurisprudence and decided that, although he does lose his political rights, a person can only enter jail when he no longer has available appeals, which it was not his case.

The annulment of the sentences

returns political rights

to Lula, who will now be able to contest the presidential elections of 2022, to which he has publicly admitted that he will run if the Workers' Party (PT) decides to run for him.

Why were the processes canceled?

Lula's lawyers had been trying for several months to have the processes against the former president annulled on the grounds that Judge Sergio Moro

was partial in his decisions

and that he was rewarded for them with his appointment as Minister of Justice when the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro assumed the Presidency of Brazil in January 2019.

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court still has pending the analysis of several appeals that question the impartiality of Moro and the prosecutors in the case, Fachin decided to annul the proceedings

before a habeas corpus

that questioned the jurisdiction of the Curitiba court over the proceedings against the former head of state.

The processes were sent to Curitiba

because that court was responsible for all the processes of diversion of public resources from Petrobras, but Lula's lawyers alleged that none of their cases had a direct relationship with corruption in the state.

The magistrate admitted that Lula's defense had already questioned Moro's competence in the proceedings, but that until now he had not presented a direct appeal to demand the annulment of all the decisions with that argument.

According to the ruling,

Lula was accused of having been the "central figure"

of a corruption network in various public bodies, including Petrobras.

"The conduct attributed to the accused, which was to appoint and maintain agents who tolerated the illicit purposes of a criminal group in strategic positions in the federal government, was not limited to Petrobras but to an extensive list of public bodies," concluded the judge .

Other processes

Independent of the sentences handed down by the 13th court of Curitiba and now annulled,

Lula is facing trial in other courts, both in Brasilia and Sao Paulo

, for different allegations of corruption and influence peddling.

The federal justice of Brasilia has

already filed three processes

against the former president, considering that there was no evidence against him, but he still has three pending cases in which Lula has already been charged and has not yet been heard in his capacity as accused.

In the most advanced process in Brasilia, he is accused of having received illegal advantages for having extended provisional legislation that offered tax incentives to vehicle manufacturers.

A court in Sao Paulo is also trying to establish whether Lula

committed the crime of influence peddling

, through his contacts with a foreign government, to favor the business of the ARG company in Equatorial Guinea.

Can you be jailed or barred?

The former president

can still be politically disqualified

if the plenary session of the Supreme Court annuls Fachin's decision on Monday or if he is found guilty - and the sentence confirmed by a second instance court - by any of the other judges. from Brasilia and Sao Paulo that opened processes for him.

He

can

also

return to jail if

the Supreme Court annuls Fachin's decision and confirms the convictions against Lula in the last instance or if the former president is found guilty in any of the other processes and that decision is confirmed by all instances. .

Current jurisprudence prohibits his imprisonment while he has the possibility of appealing a decision.

Source: EFE and Clarín

PB

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