RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Last weekend, after Jair Bolsonaro unleashed the dogs on Federal Supreme Court (STF) Justice Luis Roberto Barroso – including personal insults – the Chief Justice’s STF colleagues talked about how to react.
Luis Roberto Barroso was the Justice who ordered the Senate to create the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (Covid CPI) to investigate possible failures of the federal government in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
The common position in the otherwise always divided STF was that president Bolsonaro had overstepped all boundaries and would have to be confronted with equal rigor. An official note would not suffice. The Justices demanded that the message be given “eye to eye.”
And so Luis Fux did. On Monday, July 12, the Presiding Justice, using a conciliatory tone, pondered with Bolsonaro that “the entire court was disturbed” by the level of aggressiveness adopted against Barroso and that the situation was very serious.
“The way it is, we can’t do it anymore. It’s not just Barroso. The whole court is upset. President, if this doesn’t stop, the court will unite against you. This is very bad. Losing total contact with the Court, with everyone against you,” said Fux to the president, according to reports from his colleagues.