Minister Dias Toffoli says that the STF has an understanding of the CNMP’s competence over action taken when Deltan Dallagnol was still a prosecutor.| Photo: Luis Macedo/Chamber of Deputies

Federal deputy Deltan Dallagnol (Podemos-PR) had a lawsuit against the National Council of the Public Ministry dismissed by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) this Thursday (9). The petition contested a disciplinary sanction applied by the council in 2019 when the parliamentarian was still a public prosecutor in Curitiba.

In the monocratic decision of Judge Dias Toffoli (see in full), the council remained within its constitutional competences and that the STF has a consolidated understanding that “it is not up to it to replace correctional councils in the value analysis of elements that give rise to the opening of proceedings and the application of administrative sanctions”.

Toffoli also stated that the warning applied by the CNMP does not contain any defect in the grounds of criticism that Dallagnol would have made to ministers of the Second Panel of the STF in an interview at the time, that certain decisions of the magistrates “send a very strong message of leniency in favor of corruption”. “With all clarity and in an exhaustive manner”, he says, the then Public Prosecutor would have adopted a conduct incompatible with the attributions of the position he held.

The CNMP states that the then prosecutor “exceeded the limit of his right” and that the speech “generated repercussions in several communication vehicles”. In the petition, Dallagnol contested the warning and said that he had the right to express his thoughts and freedom of expression protected by the Federal Constitution.

The ex-prosecutor was wanted by the People’s Gazette to comment on the STF decision, but declined to comment.