Brazil’s Supreme Court rejects Lula’s bid to avoid jail
Brazil’s top court voted 6-5 to reject former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s petition to stay out of prison while appealing a corruption conviction. The decision means da Silva will likely soon be forced to serve his 12-year sentence.
The 6-5 decision was a blow for Brazil’s country’s most popular politician, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is fighting to save his political career in the face of six additional corruption cases. (AP Archive)
Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday rejected former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s bid to delay a 12-year prison sentence for corruption in a ruling that could upend presidential elections in Latin America’s biggest country.
The 6-5 ruling means that Lula – who was Brazil’s most popular leader on record and is the frontrunner ahead of the October 7 polls – could be arrested within days.
The 11 judges deliberated for more than 10 hours from Wednesday into Thursday on Lula’s request to avoid going to prison while he mounts fresh appeals. At 5-5, it was court president Carmen Lucia who cast the tie-breaking vote, saying that postponing serving of sentences “could lead to impunity.”
Broadcast live on television, the drama left Brazilians as divided as the judges themselves, and raised questions over the state of the country’s democracy after the top army general appeared to urge prison for the 72-year-old founder of the leftist Workers’ Party.
On the right, Lula is considered the face of corruption sweeping the country’s political elite. His imprisonment has long been the goal of prosecutors running Brazil’s “Car Wash” anti-graft investigation and he is now their biggest scalp.
Leftists, however, remember Lula’s 2003-2010 rule as a time when Brazil used its wealth to lift tens of millions of people out of poverty.
For them, the entire corruption case is a sham cooked up by a judiciary giving major political figures accused of corruption on the right – including current President Michel Temer – an easier ride.
Those competing visions mirror the increasingly polarised election campaign in which a hard-right former army officer, Jair Bolsonaro, is currently second in the polls behind Lula, with centrists struggling to make ground.
Journalist Michael Fox has more.
Popular but divisive
Lula was sentenced to 12 years and one month in prison after being convicted last year of accepting a seaside apartment as a bribe from a major construction company seeking government contracts. He appealed in a lower court but lost.
Under current law, that meant he should go immediately to prison, even while conducting further appeals in two higher courts. However, Lula applied to the Supreme Court for habeas corpus, allowing him to remain free during the appeals, potentially keeping him out of jail for a long period.
The Supreme Court’s deliberations on the sensitive case took place under extraordinary social and political pressure.
Late Tuesday, up to 20,000 people demonstrated in Brazil’s biggest city, Sao Paulo, to demand Lula go to prison and be barred from the election, with smaller rival rallies gathering in Brasilia on Wednesday.
More than 5,000 judges and prosecutors sent the Supreme Court a petition for Lula to be imprisoned immediately and justices have received thousands of emails on the subject.
At the same time, the court had to contend with the fact that Lula remains enormously popular with much of the population, especially in the poorer north-east.
A demonstrator wearing a mask depicting Brazil’s former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva takes part in a protest in Brasilia, Brazil, on April 3, 2018. (Reuters)
Army rumblings
The most notable pressure ahead of the court ruling came from Brazil’s army commander, who broke traditional non-interference in politics by appearing to call for Lula to be imprisoned.
General Eduardo Villas Boas tweeted late Tuesday that the military shared Brazilians’ “desire for the repudiation of impunity.”
Villas Boas also asked “who is really thinking about the good of the country and future generations and who is only worried about personal interests?”
Asseguro à Nação que o Exército Brasileiro julga compartilhar o anseio de todos os cidadãos de bem de repúdio à impunidade e de respeito à Constituição, à paz social e à Democracia, bem como se mantém atento às suas missões institucionais.
— General Villas Boas (@Gen_VillasBoas) April 3, 2018
The comments triggered immediate criticism, given that high-ranking generals have mostly kept out of politics since the restoration of democracy in 1985, following two decades of military dictatorship.
Amnesty International criticised the comments as a “threat to the democratic state of law.”
But Brazil’s defence minister argued on Wednesday that Villas Boas was simply trying to reassure the nation.
“The message was that people can be calm, because the institutions are here. It was not a message about using force. It was the opposite,” said the minister, Joaquim Silva e Luna, in Globo newspaper.
