Pacheco accuses fake news, but has a close link with the Civil Code proposal

The president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), has tried to dissociate himself from the controversies surrounding the draft report for the new Civil Code, accusing those who link it to the gaps that the proposal opens for an ideological revolution in concepts such as family, marriage and person in Brazilian legislation.

There is robust evidence, however, that Pacheco is closely linked to the proposal, not only because he took the initiative to open the process of updating the Civil Code, but also because of his direct involvement, in 2023, in the formation of the commission of jurists that drafted the report loaded with ideological bias.

Pacheco is a childhood friend of the draft project’s main legal mentor, lawyer Flavio Tartuce. The two were born in the same year and grew up in the city of Passos, in the interior of Minas Gerais. “Congratulations to my dear childhood friend Rodrigo Pacheco on his election to the Presidency of the Senate and the National Congress. You are a source of pride for Passos and Minas”, declared Tartuce in a post on February 1, 2021 on Instagram, in which the two appear together in one photo.

Although the official responsible for nominating the commission’s members was the national inspector of justice, Luis Felipe Salomão, the choice of names has a relevant component of political negotiation, and the historical relationship with Pacheco may have been decisive in leading Tartuce to rapporteurship.

When he was invited to join the commission, the lawyer even published a letter signed by Pacheco on Instagram that made his appointment official. The report presented on February 26th reflects Tartuce’s preponderance in the construction of the draft: several of his flags as a civil lawyer gained great weight in the document.

In addition to not being able to hide his influence on the choice of committee members, the president of the Senate also cannot declare himself exempt in relation to the controversial issues that were addressed in the report. In August 2023, Pacheco said that one of the purposes of updating the Civil Code would be precisely to consolidate into law the interpretations of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the National Council of Justice (CNJ) in relation to the concept of family.

“Obviously, There are a series of things that need to be reviewed, including family relationships, the concept of family todayincluding due to judicial decisions of the Federal Supreme Court, which, in fact, impose a reflection on this update”, stated the senator at the time of the commission’s creation.

Also last year, in an interview with the Portuguese newspaper News Diary, Pacheco was explicit in saying that the renewal of the Civil Code had customs issues as one of its focuses. Asked about the bill that prohibits the equality between marriage and same-sex unions, he stated: “It should not be discussed, except to put into law the rule of same-sex unions. There can be no regression and the law must be provided for in this sense. To this end, I established a commission of jurists in the Senate to update the Civil Code and introduce same-sex marriage“.

The report of the commission convened by Pacheco ends up going beyond giving legal effect to the Supreme Court’s decision on stable same-sex unions, going so far as to open a loophole, in its article 1.564-D, to give legitimacy to unions parallel to marriage – that is, the recognize a concubinage simultaneously with a marriage as worthy of being called a “stable union”.

The report from People’s Gazette contacted Rodrigo Pacheco’s office and requested an interview with the senator, who did not respond until the publication of this text. In case of a response from the parliamentarian, this text will be updated.

The idea of ​​leaving a legacy may have motivated Pacheco to want to speed up the renewal of the Civil Code

At the beginning of this year, Pacheco stated that the reformulation of the Civil Code would be one of the legislative priorities of 2024. This is the last year of his term as president of the House, and the idea of ​​leaving a personal legacy in Brazilian legislation could be one of the factors which motivated him to accelerate the change of the Civil Code.

Pacheco has a law degree from PUC Minas and worked as a criminal lawyer before entering politics. He followed a common path in Brazilian public life: climbing positions in the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) and then running for a position as a parliamentarian. At OAB, when he was 35 years old, he reached the position of federal councilor for Minas Gerais, in 2012. Two years later, he was elected federal deputy.

The senator’s political trajectory is therefore intertwined with his career in Law, and the approval of a new Civil Code would be convenient to leave his name marked in history not only among his political colleagues, but also in the legal environment, where he built his reputation. professional trajectory and a large part of your social network.

Jurists interviewed by the report see this interest in leaving his signature in the Civil Code as a plausible explanation for Pacheco’s rush, with the hope of approval of the project in 2024. The establishment of a tight deadline of 180 days for the commission of jurists to deliver their proposals, without due participation from society, is an atypical maneuver. Historically, the preparation of this type of document in Brazil and other countries is preceded by an extensive period of discussions.

If the new Civil Code is approved in 2024, as Pacheco wants, Brazil could be the first country in the world to enact two new codes of this type in the 21st century. The country’s first Civil Code, from 1916, was drawn up in 1899 under the command of jurist Clóvis Beviláqua (1859-1944). The second, from 2002, began to be discussed in 1969; At the beginning of the 1970s, jurist Miguel Reale led a commission responsible for drafting the document. After almost three decades of debates, adjustments and revisions, the Civil Code was finally approved by the National Congress in 2001, sanctioned by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 2002, and only came into force on January 11, 2003.

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. There are several countries where the Civil Code in force is still from the 19th century – this is the case, for example, in South American nations such as Colombia (where the document in force dates back to 1873), Ecuador (1858) and Chile (1855) – which highlights how rare it is to discuss a renewal of this document in such a short period of time.

Tartuce, Pacheco’s childhood friend, is prominent in the report

Although he is not an explicit supporter of radical far-left agendas – he does not usually openly support, for example, the legalization of abortion – rapporteur Flavio Tartuce supports, like Pacheco, the average worldview of the intellectuals of the establishment progressive legal system.

In lectures and publications, he has on the tip of his tongue a speech that seeks to give space to the progressive whims of fashion, pleasing the beautiful peoplewhile being careful with language to avoid immediate repudiation of conservatives and common sense.

Tartuce made a point, for example, of advocating for the use of the term “Family Law” in the new Civil Code – the other rapporteur, Rosa Nery, prefers the expression “Family Law”, as stated in the current Code. For someone unaware of the nuances of the cultural war in the field of language, the motivation for using the plural in this case may go unnoticed, which is to highlight that the concept of family would be open to practically any type of emotional relationship between people.

This type of sneaky strategy in the use of language is also found in devices such as the one that gives “progressive autonomy” to children and adolescents, in the use of ill-defined expressions such as “coexistence society” and “non-marital family”, in the definition of the baby in pregnancy as a “potential for human life” and in the prediction that animals “make up the person’s socio-family environment”. Possible consequences of this have already been explained by People’s Gazette.

Tartuce is a member of IBDFAM, an institution specializing in family issues with an open bias towards gender ideology. In one of his articles published on the association’s website, from 2021, he states:

I think that the future holds an even newer way of thinking about families, and that, soon, multiple relationships will be legally admitted, whether the concomitance of more than one stable union, or the presence of this in common with marriage. I believe that the future, in addition to traditional models, also belongs to parallel families – with more than one family bond, between different people, one or more of them common to the relationships –, and polyaffective families – with a unique bond, between more than two people. If the family is plural, plural ties can be options offered by the legal system for the exercise of private autonomy, for those who desire such a form of constitution.

In the commission of jurists that prepares the draft, some members have felt marginalized in the process of creating the document, in an internal dynamic in which important suggestions tend to be overshadowed. Evidence of this is the comparative table between the original text and the amendment proposals, which shows how the report practically ignored the work of the subcommittees, where many suggestions to stop ideological bias had been given. Furthermore, the other rapporteur, Rosa Nery, has not been able to contain Tartuce’s preponderance, even though she was initially seen as someone capable of exerting an important counterweight.

Contributing to all this, of course, is the very tight deadline, which makes a proper analysis of the points under discussion practically impossible, even for those within the commission. The thousands of pages of subcommittee reports, the general report and proposed amendments make it clear that important dissent within the legal committee is being ignored.

Accusation of fake news has been trivialized to silence opponents

Although the reasons for the backlash regarding the commission’s work are evident, Pacheco and Tartuce reacted in unison against critics of the general report published on February 26, accusing them of “fake news”.

“They said that I am in favor of polygamy, changing the sex of children and other things. This is, obviously, a completely outright lie,” said Pacheco.

Tartuce, in turn, superficially commented on society’s reaction to the general report in a videoconference lecture for the OAB-SP, accusing those who saw threats to the family, marriage and the unborn child in the document of superficiality. “Be careful with this fake news. It’s false news,” she said. At the same event, he called the People’s Gazette pejoratively “tabloid”.

As already noted by People’s Gazette in an editorial, “calling fake news a statement that one disagrees with has become a convenient crutch to escape the debate while demoralizing an opponent.”