STF Justice Gilmar Mendes Repeats Himself, Again Saying Lula Deserves Retrial

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Federal Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes has for the second time harshly criticized Lava Jato’s modus operandi, and prosecutor and task force coordinator Deltan Dallagnol’s attempts to monetize the operation.

In his opinion, the facts already disclosed by Vaza Jato “are extremely serious” and “need to be investigated”.

In an interview with journalist Kennedy Alencar, in the late edition of CBN News, he also held the conservative press accountable for being mainly responsible for setting up the “oppressive model” of Lava Jato and this is why he has called for former President Lula to have the right to a rerial.

Mendes had previously said, on August 24th in an interview with Reuters, that “we owe Lula a fair trial.”

“The Judiciary is experiencing its greatest institutional crisis because two pillars of the judicial system were affected in a single act and in a single context. The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal courts were directly affected. The truth is that it can be said that this affected a certain court, a certain sector, eventually affects courts, but the whole system was contaminated by this thing,” he said.

The Justice also criticized the monetization of Lava Jato through lectures given by the prosecutors involved. “The mercantile nature of positions, the attempt to profit from the position itself, the sale… The greatest misuse of Lava Jato I have seen so far is in those conversations between the broker and Dallagnol. He is monetizing Lava Jato. You cannot monetize Lava Jato. What is monetizing an operation? It’s monetizing a public function. That has a name in the criminal code. So this is serious. And the various deflections, the persecutory intent. All this is very serious and needs to be investigated”.

In the interview, Gilmar also criticized the militias when he said that “the fight against crime cannot be conducted by committing a crime” and that it is “necessary to be very careful with judgments and vigilantes”.

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