Barroso sees impeachment of STF minister as expelled player
The president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Luís Roberto Barroso, used a football metaphor to criticize requests for impeachment against ministers of the Court, a list led by minister Alexandre de Moraes, with 24 protocols in the Senate, the last one on the 9th. “When one of the teams starts working to expel players from the other, he stops playing and doesn’t want to let his rival play,” he told CNN Brazil on Saturday (28).
By preferring not to explore the impartiality required of the referee in a football match, Barroso preferred to include the 11 STF judges in the field of an institutional dispute. His statement repeats the argument he has already expressed on other occasions, that the Judiciary has also become a political power in Brazil, equivalent in this aspect to the other Executive and Legislative branches.
“I think impeachment is an undesirable element of the public debate, which is wanting to expel the player from the other team instead of playing the game according to natural rules”, reinforced Barroso in the same interview, which aired on the eve of a second public protest in favor of Moraes’ dismissal, this time in Belo Horizonte. The minister has been rapporteur for over five years on inquiries such as Fake News and Digital Militias, in addition to criminal actions on January 8th. His stance is criticized for ignoring due legal process, contradicting the Penal Code and the Constitution.
When participating, on July 5, 2023, in Porto Alegre in the 7th Meeting of the Council of Presidents of the Courts of Justice of Brazil (Consepre), Barroso stated in his lecture that “the Judiciary power in Brazil, after the Federal Constitution of 1988, lived and still lives a dizzying process of institutional ascension”.
This change meant that the Judiciary went from being “a specialized technical department” “for some time” to becoming “a political power in Brazilian life”. “There has been a change in the nature, role, visibility, and expectations that exist in relation to the Judiciary,” he concluded.
On August 27, Barroso rejected the request that Moraes be prevented from working in the preliminary investigations into the leak of messages from his assistants at the STF and the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The impeachment request was presented by the defense of Eduardo Tagliaferro, former head of the TSE’s Special Advisory for Combating Disinformation. More recently, on September 19, Barroso classified as a “myth” the allegations that the defendants involved in the acts of January 8 are innocent.
