New Civil Code is an ideological bomb about to be processed in the Senate

The president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), wants the rapid processing of a proposal that practically creates a new Civil Code for the country, changing the current one in its essence and in a large part of its entire structure. If approved as it stands now, the document would promote a legal revolution in Brazil, meeting the demands of abortionism, woke identitarianism and defenders of gender ideology, and radically altering the concepts of family and person in legislation.

Last week, a commission of jurists formed by the Senate created a draft to change the Civil Code, which is open to receive amendments until Friday (8). After this period, the document begins to be processed in the House. Some of the most serious changes anticipated include:

• The definition of the unborn baby as “potential for pre-uterine or uterine human life”, which introduces into the Civil Code the notion that the baby, before being born, would not have human life.
• The recognition of a “progressive autonomy” of children and adolescents, who must have “consideration of their will in all matters related to them, in accordance with their age and maturity” – which would pave the way, for example, to facilitate surgery for sexual reassignment without the need for parental consent, among other things.
• The provision that the father will lose his parental authority in court if he subjects the child to “any type of psychological violence” – the law does not specify the attitudes that can be classified as “psychological violence”.
• The prediction that pets can form “the person’s socio-family environment”, and that the emotional relationship between humans and animals “can derive legitimacy for the corresponding protection of interests, as well as reparatory claims for damages experienced by those who enjoy your company” – which would elevate the legal status of the relationship between people and animals, opening space for the legal recognition of what has been called a “multispecies family”.
• The introduction of the concept of “coexistence society”, which could pave the way to include in Brazilian legislation, for example, polyaffective unions (see more details in the PDF at the end of this article).

The commission of jurists that prepared the draft is chaired by Luis Felipe Salomão, national inspector of Justice and minister of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ). The document’s rapporteur is Rosa Maria de Andrade Nery and Flávio Tartuce.

The figures most directly involved in drafting the document that is about to be processed in the Senate have called the current project a “revision” or “update” of the Code. However, the changes are so substantial – the document with the proposals is 293 pages long – that the Senate’s official website has already called the project the “new Civil Code”.

Creating a new Civil Code is a rare measure; current version is only two decades old

Civil Law is the branch of Law in which all relationships established by people from birth to death are structured, and in which concepts such as person, marriage, family and property are discussed from a legal point of view. Therefore, the Civil Code is essential within the political system and serves as a conceptual basis for much of the country’s other legislation.

It is no coincidence that democracies tend to prefer a cautious approach in any attempt to revise the Civil Code, with long public scrutiny, participation of different sectors of civil society and direct involvement of parliamentarians with different views. The discussion of the current proposal, however, has been accelerated by figures such as Pacheco and Salomão.

The president of the Senate already made it clear at the beginning of the year that the Civil Code would be one of his priorities for 2024. The approval of the document is seen as a possible legacy of his Presidency, which would give him chancellorship, among other things, to appoint the next president. of the House. The rush to approve the Code also has another motivation: to avoid the attention and resistance of conservative benches, which could embargo the project.

To date, Brazil has only had two Civil Codes: the one from 1916 and the current one, which dates back to 2002. For the production of the Civil Code currently in vogue, there were decades of maturation and broad debate. The draft of the 2002 document began to be prepared at the end of the 1960s, which reflects the importance given to parsimony in the reformulation of the document that governs civil relations in the country. In other countries, the situation tends to be similar. In Germany and France, recent reforms of a smaller scale than those expected to be processed in the Brazilian Senate have been debated for more than ten years.

The opening for suggestions on the draft of the new Civil Code was made last week and will end on Friday – in other words, the Brazilian Senate gave society just two weeks to discuss the document.

See a summary of the changes that could impact topics such as life, family and marriage

The PDF file below contains a summary of the main changes proposed in the draft of the new Civil Code in matters related to the person, life, family and marriage. Check out: